Measuring Services Trade Liberalization and Its Impact on Economic Growth: An Illustration

The paper has three purposes. First, it explains how the impact of liberalization of service sectors on output growth differs from that of liberalization of trade in goods. Second, it suggests a policy-based rather than outcome-based measure of the openness of a country's services regime. Such openness measures are constructed for two key service sectors, basic telecommunications and financial services. Finally, it provides some econometric evidence-relatively strong for the financial sector and less strong, but nevertheless statistically significant, for the telecommunications sector-that openness in services influences long run growth performance. Our estimates suggest that countries with fully open telecommunications and financial services sectors grow up to 1.5 percentage points faster than other countries.