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Building capacity to help Africa trade better

Trade in Services in Africa

Infographics

Trade in Services in Africa

The following set of papers contains a large amount of visualised data on trade in services in Africa. There are seven sectoral papers and one framework paper, which contextualises, defines and presents top level data. The intention of these papers is to especially assist non-quantitative researchers in understanding the pattern of services trade within Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world. However, the papers will be of use to anyone interested in quickly understanding services trade patterns in Africa.

For an overview of services trade in Africa and to understand data definitions, limitations and sources, please refer to the Framework Report.

In order to drill down into a particular sector to understand the sectoral trade patterns in more depth and to access inter and intra-REC trade patterns, please refer to the relevant sectoral report.

There are two aspects to the study that need to be pointed out here:

  1. The reports present export value added flow figures for total services trade in Africa as well as for each sector. These ‘mappings’ show the forward and backward linkages between sectors, in order to clarify the role played by services in adding value to exportable goods and other services. Therefore, these mappings attempt to explain the true participation of the service in international trade, evidenced by the extent of the ‘embodied’ service in the physical exportable.

  2. A large proportion of services are traded not directly, i.e. as evidenced by a balance of payments transaction, but rather indirectly through a foreign affiliate of a multinational company. The statistics on these foreign affiliates – Foreign Affiliate Statistics (FATS) – allow one to better understand the involvement of a country in mode 3 services trade for the particular sector.

Trade in Services in Africa

Registration to the tralac website is required to download these files.

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