The upcoming annual article on international services, to be published in the October 2008 Survey of Current Business, will feature two changes. First, table layouts will differ from those in previous articles; the new layouts are provided primarily for the convenience of users who wish to make advance preparations for the impending changes. The tables available through the link below contain no estimates, but they show the format in which the tables will be published, including line stubs and headers. The new tables will appear in the usual location on this web site. Second, the article will feature a new measure of services supplied through affiliates that better reflects services output in the industries of insurance and wholesale and retail trade.
New table layouts will be used in this year’s presentation of the detailed statistics on cross-border trade in services to reflect a shift in focus from trade by affiliation to trade by type of service. This focus is more consistent with international guidelines and better meets the needs of most data users. However, information on affiliation will continue to be shown. This reorientation is the result of expanded data collection of affiliated trade by type of service, which began in 2006. Headers and stub lines for those tables affected by this change can be found at the link below.
Table 1, which shows global cross-border trade totals over several years, will be restructured to show total trade (affiliated and unaffiliated transactions combined) for several types of services for which only unaffiliated trade had been available. Total trade for these types of services will be available beginning with 2006. In table 4, which shows country detail for royalties and license fees, the detail by type of intangible assets will cover total transactions, not just unaffiliated transactions. Table 5, which shows “other” private services, will be expanded to include country-level estimates by affiliation and by type of service; previously the country-level estimates in this table covered only unaffiliated transactions. Table 7, which shows country-level estimates of various type of business, professional, and technical services will be reformulated to include detail by type of service for total trade instead of just unaffiliated trade and will be expanded to disaggregate affiliated transactions according to the underlying direct investment relationship (outward vs. inward). Finally, the country stub in all tables will be expanded to include Ireland.
Changes to the Measure of International Services Delivered through Affiliates
Beginning this year, BEA will feature new measures for certain services delivered by multinational companies through their affiliates that are located in, but owned outside, of the markets that they serve. The new measures will replace sales-based measures with measures more akin to output for two important industries—insurance and wholesale and retail trade—and will better capture the services supplied through affiliates in these industries than sales did.