For the first time, export and import statistics are available for U.S. trade in services with 237 countries and areas, up from 90 previously. Ecuador, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Ukraine are among the countries newly broken out from BEA’s overall services trade statistics.
This is part of an ongoing effort at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to provide more information about services trade, a wide array that includes financial services, travel, information services, and intellectual property rights.
The statistics on services exports, imports, and trade balance by country and area are in a new annual table, “Table 2.4. U.S. Trade in Services, Expanded Geographic Detail.” These statistics can provide new insight into the impact of trade on the United States and partner economies, support U.S. trade policy initiatives and negotiations, and deepen the understanding of global supply chains. The new information also allows for more comparisons between countries and could lead to improved measurement of services trade, which contributes to other BEA statistics, including gross domestic product, or GDP.
Publishing geographic detail for services statistics is more challenging than for goods. Cross-border shipments of goods, such as cars and food, are monitored by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But services transactions, by their nature, are more difficult to identify and to attribute to exporting and importing countries. BEA’s services statistics rely heavily on information collected on BEA surveys of businesses, whose company-reported data are protected from disclosure, limiting the amount of detail BEA can publish.
Over the past decade, BEA has improved its trade in services statistics by:
- Increasing the level of detail by type of service.
- Expanding the availability of quarterly statistics.
- Including aggregations of services measuring trade in information and communications technology and trade that is digitally deliverable.
- Adding statistics highlighting the characteristics of U.S. firms that trade services.
BEA also expanded the information available in international statistics on services supplied abroad through foreign affiliates of U.S. multinationals (Tables 4.1-4.4) and to the United States by foreign-owned U.S. affiliates. Together with U.S. trade in services, these statistics provide a broader picture of the services supplied by and to the United States (Tables 5.1-5.4).
BEA’s most detailed statistics on U.S. trade in services are released each July. In addition to the new Table 2.4 published July 3, annual data with more detail on services trade with 90 countries and areas are available in Table 2.2 and Table 2.3.
The international transactions accounts also include some quarterly and annual statistics on services trade. Monthly statistics are available in the international trade in goods and services news release, jointly published by BEA and the U.S. Census Bureau.