Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are the main enabling factor in making services more tradable, and more traded, but the statistical system for classifying and capturing these international transactions lags behind.
The side event will discuss, inter alia, how policymakers and statisticians can produce more precise data on the trade generated by the provision of ICT services (telecommunications services, IT system design, software development, and related tasks), and on the remote provision of ICT-enabled services, such as human resource management, payroll, accounting, architectural design, research, editing, and education.
The side event is inscribed in the process of the fifth revision of the Classification of Broad Economic Categories (BEC), an international product classification. The new BEC will allow developing countries to analyse in more detail their participation in global value chains, which is of vital importance to grow their ICT sectors through higher value-added services.
At the event, UNCTAD will present the first systematic and detailed attempt to define and classify services enabled by ICTs. The proposal builds on existing classifications and is contained in the UNCTAD Technical Note on ICT for Development N ̊3, released in October 2015. The technical note also proposes indicators to measure imports and exports of ICT services and ICT-enabled services, defined in collaboration with the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development and the Task Force on International Trade Statistics. The classification and the indicator proposals recognize that ICTs are the main enabling factors that have increased the international trade of services in recent years.
