The crisis-resilience of services trade

Ingo Borchert and Aaditya Mattoo

No 4917, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Much attention has focused on the impact of the current crisis on goods trade; hardly any on its impact on services trade. Using new trade data from the United States, and more aggregate data from other OECD countries, the authors show that services trade is weathering the current crisis much better than goods trade. As of February 2009, the value of US goods imports had declined year-on-year by 33 percent and the value of goods exports by 21 percent; services imports and exports each had declined by less than 7 percent. Within services, interesting patterns are emerging. Trade in goods-related transport services and crisis-related financial services has shrunk, as has expenditure on tourism abroad. But trade in a range of business, professional, and technical services is still increasing, with US exports growing even faster (at 10 percent) than US imports (at 7 percent). Developing countries like India, which are relatively specialized in business process outsourcing and information technology services, have suffered much smaller declines in total exports to the United States than countries like Brazil and China and regions like Africa, which are specialized in exports of goods, transport services, or tourism services. On the basis of new evidence from Indian services exporters, the authors suggest that services trade is buoyant relative to goods trade for two reasons: demand for a range of traded services is less cyclical, and services trade and production are less dependent on external finance. Even though few explicitly protectionist measures have so far been taken in services, the changing political climate and the widening boundaries of the state in crisis countries may introduce a national bias in firms'procurement and location choices.

Keywords: Transport Economics Policy&Planning; Trade Policy; Economic Theory&Research; ICT Policy and Strategies; Commodities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-int and nep-tur
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (62)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... ered/PDF/WPS4917.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The crisis-resilience of services trade (2009)
Working Paper: The Crisis Resilience of Services Trade (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4917

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().