Working with World Bank to measure digital trade in services in the Pacific Alliance

In the past several years, a number of trends such as trade liberalization, internet connectivity, and cloud computing capabilities have expanded the opportunities for Pacific Alliance (Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru) region's businesses to source specialized IT, engineering, professional services, and other business services digitally from outside vendors, and to incorporate these services into their own products and services. The regional economies have also worked to expand their own production and exports of sophisticated digitally deliverable services. In addition, the region’s established firms, for example in such sectors as manufacturing and mining, have worked to ideate and develop digital solutions to improve their productivity and their products and services.

In 2021-22, Nextrade worked with the World Bank and the Services Subcommittee of the Pacific Alliance to:

• Analyze the relevance, growth, and direction of trade in knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms in the four Pacific Alliance economies;

• Map the universe of formal firms that supply KIBS in the four countries by such dimensions as sector, firm size, and gender of employees;

• Produce detailed geospatial mappings on the location of KIBS firms, to assess teh rise of clusters; and

• Review the regulatory framework for KIBS and digital services sector and the main challenges these frameworks entail.