2018 – part1 – 1 – 4

Experts discuss how to measure services trade in the digital age

Experts from the WTO Secretariat and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) met at WTO headquarters on 1 March to discuss how to better measure trade in services in the digital age. The event was the first in the “Simply Services” speaker series, an informal platform for sharing the latest information on trends in services trade.

Andreas Maurer, Chief of International Trade Statistics at the WTO, described efforts currently under way among international agencies to enhance measurement of digital trade. He underlined how current statistics address elements relevant for digital trade and highlighted some of the challenges ahead from a statistical standpoint.

Diana Korka, from UNCTAD’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Policy Section, presented UNCTAD’s project on measuring exports of ICT-enabled services. She noted that the increasing importance of services delivered over ICT networks offered increasing opportunities for developing countries. As a result, there was greater demand for better data to capture services exported in such a manner. Pilot implementation of the project had been conducted in three developing countries in 2017.

Source: wto.org