Towards new Trade in Value‑Added (TiVA) indicators that account for modes of supply in services trade

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) defines services trade through four modes of supply (MoS): (1) cross-border supply, (2) consumption abroad, (3) commercial presence, and (4) presence of natural persons. This paper presents a unique quantification of bilateral services trade by MoS based on a novel and experimental dataset that leverages the OECD Analytical Activities of Multinational Enterprises (AMNE) database and Inter-Country Input-Output tables. It also introduces new Trade in Value Added (TiVA) indicators to trace the contributions of services and different modes of supply to value added across industries and economies. The resulting OECD TiVA-MoS dataset underscores the importance of Mode 3 (commercial presence) which is not captured by standard trade statistics, yet accounted for almost half of global services trade in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data.