United States Statistics on Trade in Services

摘要

Services account for a significant share of the international trade of the United States. In 1999, U.S. exports of services amounted to ;272 billion, or 28 percent of total U.S. exports of goods and services. U.S. imports of services were ;191 billion, 16 percent of total U.S. imports of goods and services. The balance on services -a trade surplus of ;81 billion offset almost one fourth of the ;345 billion deficit on trade in goods recorded in the U.S. international transactions accounts for 1999. In 1997 as of this writing, the most recent year for which data on sales through foreign affiliates are available the values of services delivered to foreign markets by majority-owned foreign affiliates of U.S. companies, and to U.S. markets by majority-owned U.S. affiliates of foreign companies, equaled or exceeded the respective values of cross-border exports and imports of services. In that year, sales of services to foreign (non-U.S.) persons by majority-owned foreign affiliates of U.S. companies were, at ;258 billion, almost identical to the ;259 billion in cross-border exports. Sales of services in the United States by majority-owned U.S. affiliates of foreign companies totaled ;206 billion, which was 23 percent higher than the ;167 billion in cross-border services imports in 1997. To meet the needs associated with growth in the value of trade in services, trade negotiations, and the development of new and more detailed international guidelines for statistical compilation, the United States has taken a variety of steps over roughly the past 15 years to improve the coverage, specificity, and international comparability of its statistics on trade in services. Included among them have been improvements in data on both trade in the conventional sense of exchanges between residents and nonresidents and services delivered through locally established affiliates, the latter corresponding broadly to the General Agreement on Trade in Services commercial presence mode of supply and commonly referred to as 'foreign affiliates trade in services', or FATS. In this paper, I will describe the U.S. data collection system for trade in services, discuss improvements that have been made in it, and identify some improvement tasks that remain.