5.2 Latin American and Caribbean services exports, by sector, through all modes of supply, 2017

Data like those in figure 5.1 warrant an important caveat: they are based on services trade as reported in the balance of payments. But those statistics capture only a part of services trade as conceptualized under GATS—namely mode 1 and some elements of modes 2 and 4. Mode 3 (sales by foreign affiliates), though the most important, is absent. In some sectors, mode 3 is crucial to market entry, so including it to get a sense of its role in trade is important.

Recent work by the WTO provides a picture of trade in services through the experimental Trade in Services Data by Mode of Supply (TiSMoS) dataset. In 2017, the latest year of TiSMoS data, Latin American and Caribbean countries’ total services exports—in the GATS sense—amounted to US$296.4 billion, compared with US$204.2 billion recorded in the balance of payments data reported in the World Development Indicators database. The discrepancy is nearly one-third of the TiSMoS total, so the potential to be misleading is high for an analysis that stops with the data in figure 5.1. TiSMoS shows that the Latin American and Caribbean region’s services exports are almost all in mode 1 (35.6 percent), mode 3 (31.8 percent), and mode 2 (29.3 percent), with mode 4 playing a minor role.

Figures 5.2 and 5.3 break down the region’s services trade by sector, summing all GATS modes of supply. On the export side (figure 5.2), the leading sectors

Figure 5.2 Latin American and Caribbean services exports, by sector, through all modes of supply, 2017

Others, %5 Transportation, 11%

Trade-related services (distribution), 24%

Tourism and business travel, %23

Other business services (excluding trade related), %13

Telecommunications, computer, information, and audiovisual services, 11% Insurance and financial services, %13

Source: Trade in Services data by Mode of Supply (TiSMoS) database, World Trade Organization.