Services Trade Restrictiveness Index

Services trade plays a critical role in the global economy and can deliver the most benefits when the right policies are in place. The OECD has been measuring restrictions to services trade for over a decade.

The latest update of the OECD STRI shows that barriers to services trade remained high in 2025. New restrictions offset market-opening reforms. The pace of reform slowed, indicating a stagnation of services policy modernisation at a time when trade debates remain largely focused on manufacturing.

New restrictions in 2025 include foreign investment screening mechanisms and sector-specific policies affecting physical infrastructure and audiovisual services. Liberalisation primarily occurred due to reforms in financial services, and logistics and related services.

The figure shows changes in the STRI across sectors, where decreases in the index values indicate trade liberalisation and increases show trade restrictive changes. 

The annual update of the STRI database reveals wide differences in regulatory performance across countries. 

In 2025, Japan, the Netherlands and Spain ranked among the most open services markets. New Zealand, Indonesia and India were the countries with the highest degree of reform, easing procedures for business travel, lowering restrictions on foreign entry across several services sectors, and liberalising insurance services, respectively.

The STRI shows that the degree of services trade restrictiveness between OECD and non-OECD countries has continued to narrow over time, but significant differences remain in regional outcomes.

The average level of restrictiveness in non-OECD countries is still 55% higher than in OECD countries. This indicates the need for continued regulatory co-operation to overcome disparities that maintain global asymmetries on the playing field and compound trade imbalances.

At the same time, several non-OECD economies, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, have been progressively easing barriers on services trade in recent years. Over the period 2014-25, the Asia-Pacific region recorded a notable decrease of more than 6.5% in overall level of restrictiveness.

The country notes are short summaries of the STRI results for each country. The country notes were last updated in February 2026.

Translations are available for the following country notes: Brazil (Brasil), China (中 国), Colombia (Colombia), France (France), Germany (Deutschland), Italy (Italia), Japan (日本), Mexico (México), Peru (Perú), Türkiye (Türkiye).

Regulatory database: The online STRI regulatory database displays the detailed information used to develop the index, along with sources and comments for all countries and sectors. This qualitative database also provides the source of the regulation, along with the title of the law, relevant articles, a web link to the law, and a comment if additional explanations are required.

Policy Simulator: The STRI Policy Simulator allows policy makers and experts to explore the impact of a change at a detailed level for each measure, and to compare a specific country with a range of other selected countries in a particular sector.

STRI Explorer: The STRI Explorer is an interactive web tool that allows users to investigate the STRI database and indices in a flexible manner. It allows users to compare the services trade restrictiveness of different countries, sectors, years, or policy areas, or to examine a specific case in more detail. The resulting downloadable graphs and tables can be used to analyse trends and patterns in services trade policy.

Digital Services Trade Restrictiveness Index: The Digital STRI captures cross-cutting barriers that affect trade in digitally enabled services, complementing the STRI. The Digital STRI Simulator can be used to explore the impact of policy changes and compare the regulatory set-ups across economies.

Intra-EEA Services Trade Restrictiveness Index: The intra-EEA STRI helps to identify which policy measures restrict trade within the European Economic Area (EEA), allowing to track the progress of regional services integration.

ASEAN STRI: The ASEAN STRI identifies, catalogues and quantifies services trade barriers in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Member States.

APEC Index: The APEC Index measures the services regulatory landscape in Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies.

STRI Regulatory Heterogeneity Indices: The STRI Regulatory Heterogeneity Indices are bilateral measures that quantify the degree of dissimilarity in regulation between a country pair based on the rich information in the STRI regulatory database, helping to highlight where regulations diverge across countries. 

The STRI scoring methodology uses binary scores. Most measures in the STRI regulatory database have binary answers (yes/no) and binary scores are applied directly. Measures that have numerical answers are broken down by thresholds to which binary scores are applied.

Some measures constitute hierarchies where one or a combination of a few measures would close a market segment or a mode of supply to foreign suppliers. In other cases, a restriction on one measure would render others irrelevant. The scoring methodology captures such hierarchies by conditioning the scoring on measures on the answers to questions higher up in the hierarchy of measures.

Some measures are complementary. These are bundled together in the scoring methodology such that if one measure in the bundle is scored as a restriction, then all of them are.

The methodology note explains the thresholds, hierarchies, and bundling of measures. It starts with the horizontal measures that are included in all sectors, followed by sector-specific scoring methodologies.

• Paper on STRI Scoring and Weighting Methodology (January 2015)
• Methodology note (May 2014)
• All indices