093 Transport and Travel Exports
Definition
Only in recent years have statistics on the import and export of services been collected and distributed in a similar format to statistics for more tangible goods. Four groups of services are considered here. The first is transport and travel services.
Transport and travel constitute 13.2% of all international goods exports; the services category itself is not a good, but calculating the cost of services as a percentage of money spent on goods gives an idea of their relative economic importance. Transport consists of transportation services for passengers, freight and other items by sea, by air, in space, by rail, by road, by inland waterway, by pipeline transport and also means of electricity transmission, and other supporting and auxiliary transport services. Travel is defined as business travel, including expenditure by seasonal and border workers, and other costs; personal travel including health-related expenditure, education-related expenditure and other personal travel expenditure. Note that “Travel covers primarily the goods and services acquired from an economy by travellers during visits of less than one year to that economy.” (International Monetary Fund, 2002, Manual on statistics of international trade in services, page 38).
Data sources
The source of all services data used here is the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) Handbook of Statistics On-line, 2005, Table 5.2.
In 2002 the territories for which the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development collected data were reported to have imported services worth $US1561 billion, and exported a gross which was worth slightly more, valued at $US1585 billion. The discrepancy between the value of imports and exports is partly explained because sometimes the service trade is not fully recorded, this tended to occur more often in territories which were net service importers. When estimates are made for those territories with missing values the discrepancy reduces between the worldwide value of service imports (now including imports by all territories US$1641 billion) and exports (now including all territories US$1654 billion). Accountants are still slightly better at recording money earned than money spent. Note that we have not adjusted total gross service trade so that total imports and exports balance perfectly, as we did for goods. This is because there are no clear reasons why the trade figures for services do not balance. When calculating the percentage of trade that each of the services constitutes, we do not include any services in our denominator partly because of these earlier adjustments that balance imports and exports of tangible goods. If services were included in the denominator we may effectively double count transport costs because these costs explain why total imports of goods have a greater value than total exports of goods.
Services constitute a fifth of recorded world trade. To achieve continuity with the figures reported for internationally traded goods the value of services is given as a proportion of the total world imports of food, goods, and other manufactures. Note that “Services are not separate entities over which ownership rights can be established. They cannot be traded separately from their production. Services are heterogeneous outputs produced to order and typically consist of changes in the condition of the consuming units realised by the activities of the producers at the demand of the customers. By the time their production is completed they must have been provided to the consumers.” (International Monetary Fund, 2002, Manual on statistics of international trade in services, page 7).
Services data is missing from all of the list of territories that are missing trade data (see technical notes 041). Data for services has also had to be estimated for additional territories, where there is no services data given: Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cook Islands, Cote d'Ivoire, Eritrea, Greenland, Lebanon, Niue, Qatar, Serbia & Montenegro, Taiwan (China), Tuvalu, and the United Arab Emirates. The following territories were missing some services data, and in those cases data was estimated from the regional average rates. This was the case in part for: Algeria, Andorra, Bahamas, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Dominica, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kiribati, Liberia, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Mauritania, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkmenistan, Vanuatu, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Click here to view detailed data source references
The quote used here is sourced from the World Trade Organisation. The quote was found in the services trade section of the World Trade Organisation website, the web address is below. This quote was accessed in April 2006.
http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/serv_e.htm
Excel sheets
Below is an explanation of each of the columns in the excel file:
Column A = Unique numerical territory (see 001).
Column B = Region and territory names (see 001).
Column C = Region code (see 001).
Column D = The ISO 3 code, or ISO ALPHA-3 (see 001).
Column E = Net transport and travel services exports, in millions of US dollars. This is calculated by multiplying net transport and travel services exports per person (column F) by population in millions (column G) (E = F * G).
Column F = Net transport and travel services exports in US dollars per person. This is calculated by dividing net transport and travel services exports in millions of US dollars (column H) by tot al population in millions (column G) (F = H/G).
Column G = Population in 2002, in millions. See the technical notes for ‘Total Population’ for the sources of this data (002).
Column H = Net transport and travel services exports in 2002, in millions of US$. The number is taken from column D of the source data sheet, where the value of exports is expressed in thousands of US$, this number is divided by 1000.
The source data is in the source data sheet. Net exports and net imports, are calculated as follows:
Net exports = exports minus imports. When imports are larger than exports the territory is not shown.
Net imports = imports minus exports. When exports are larger than imports the territory is not shown.