4 minute read

By Frédéric Parrot (frederic.parrot@oecd.org) and Antonella Liberatore (antonella.liberatore@oecd.org), OECD Statistics and Data Directorate

Services play an increasingly important role in international trade. In 2023, services trade accounted for approximately one quarter of global trade, up from one fifth a decade earlier. According to the WTO Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) database, 373 RTAs were in force as of December 2024, with an increasing number including a services chapter. Services trade is also closely related to digital trade which is rising up the policy agenda and for which a statistical framework has now been internationally agreed.

Despite growing demand from analysts and policymakers, high quality, comparable and detailed information on international trade in services remains inadequate for many economies. Due to their intangible nature, tracking services when they cross borders is inherently complex. This results in severe data gaps and large asymmetries when bilateral trade is reported. To address these issues, the OECD and WTO have developed the OECD-WTO Balanced Trade in Services database (BaTIS). Its methodology leverages the official statistics available at national level and supplements them with estimations and adjustments to provide users with a complete and balanced matrix of exports and imports, covering virtually every economy in the world.

Since the first publication of BaTIS in 2017, several advancements have been made in the compilation of trade in services statistics. First, more and more economies have been working to improve their data compilation methods and practices, bringing them closer to international guidelines. Second, a growing number of countries are publishing bilateral information on services trade. These advancements, alongside developments in the methodology, have brought with them continuous improvements in BaTIS, thanks in part to feedback from both users and compilers.

What’s new in the 2025 BaTIS?

The primary feature of the 2025 BaTIS update is the expanded coverage of service categories. Users can now access information for twenty-one unique service types, up from twelve in the previous editions. Since the services classification is hierarchical, users can explore the data at different levels to access more detailed information. For example, transport services are divided into four distinct sub-categories, while business services are further broken down into R&D services, professional services, and technical services (Table 1).

Key findings from the latest OECD-WTO BaTIS edition

Global trade in services is estimated at around USD 7.6 trillion in 2023, at current prices. Overall, Transport, Travel, and Other Business Services account for over 60% of global services trade, but the greater granularity of the data now enables a more detailed breakdown (Figure 2). Personal travel accounts for the bulk of travel; sea transport, which also includes the charges for shipping goods around the world, represents almost half of global trade in transport services; professional and technical services make up about 10% of global trade each, with R&D accounting for nearly 4% of global figures.

Between 2005 and 2023, total services trade has increased by an average annual rate of around 6% at global level, overcoming significant troughs during the Great Recession (2009) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020). But again, the enhanced granularity of BaTIS allows for a more in-depth analysis of these aggregated trends.

Digitalisation has had a considerable impact on trade in services, as technological advances allow the remote delivery of many types of services. Digitally deliverable services, i.e. services that can be delivered remotely through computer networks, grew at an average annual rate of 7.4%, higher than the 4.7% recorded for non-digitally deliverable services. Indeed, digitally deliverable services accounted for about 55% of global services trade in 2023, up from 43% in 2005 (Figure 3).

Looking at more recent trends and at some specific service categories, trade in digitally deliverable services rose by around 9% in 2023. Insurance and pension services grew by over 16% compared with the previous year, topping the chart. Information services, which include cross-border payments for services such as databases and web search portals, came second. Audiovisual services, which include the production and use (for instance through downloads or streaming) of music, film, radio and television programs, closed the podium (Figure 4).

Explore and use the data

The OECD-WTO Balanced Trade in Services dataset (BaTIS) contains a wealth of information on virtually all bilateral trade in services relationships in the world. It covers over 200 reporters and partners, total services and 26 EBOPS 2010 service categories for the 2005-23 period. 

Access the latest edition of the OECD-WTO BaTIS dataset on the OECD Data Explorer. More information on the BaTIS methodology can be found in the accompanying technical paper (PDF).