Measuring trade in services by Modes of Supply: A report on the parallel efforts by the U.S Bureau of Economic Analysis and the UK Office for National statistics

This paper reviews the similar paths followed by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to measure international services categorized by mode of supply. Most notably, these agencies have adopted a similar survey form that uses an innovative approach to collect information on mode of supply by simply having companies report the percentage of its services supplied though one mode as opposed to all modes, with the idea that the other modes can be estimated as a residual or using other data sources. Prior to these efforts by ONS and BEA, few countries had attempted to measure trade in services by mode of supply, and in these few cases, most measures had been based on assumptions about industry practices or on surveys that only asked for the predominant mode of supply rather than a more precise percentage supplied by mode.