Facilitated by the availability of ICTs, international trade in services has nearly doubled over the past decade. Such trade includes various business and knowledge processes, such as marketing, management and IT consulting. It is of strong and growing interest to both developing and developed countries, as such services represent a strategic component of the digital economy. Currently these ICT-enabled services are not well captured by official statistics.
Costa Rica will be the first country to pilot test the new survey in May-June 2017. The survey will be administered by the Central Bank of Costa Rica, in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Trade.
To help prepare the launch of the survey UNCTAD, is co-organising with the Central Bank and the Ministry of Foreign Trade a training for local staff, as well as an awareness raising event for participating enterprises.
The survey questionnaire to be pilot tested was developed by UNCTAD in 2016 in collaboration with the Inter-Agency Task Force on International Trade Statistics (TFITS), as well as experts from Costa Rica, Egypt, India and Thailand. It builds on the definition of ICT-enabled services as approved by the United Nations Statistical Commission at its 47th session in March 2016.
More transparent, comparable and comprehensive statistical data in this area are needed to help governments design, implement and monitor ICT-related policies, taking into account the recent growth of ICT-enabled services.
This project is supported financially by the Government of Sweden.
