International Services Trade Information Agency

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The International Services Trade Information Agency (ISTIA) is a non-profit international agency in Geneva, Switzerland. The ISTIA mandate is to provide capacity building to developing countries, least developed countries and economies in transition to collect, analyze and interpret trade in services information, including information relevant to foreign direct investment (FDI) and Foreign Affiliate Trade Statistics (FATS) in a manner which empowers them to participate more actively in trade in services negotiations, most notably in the context of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

This picture is the ISTIA logo

ISTIA was founded as a response to many official and informal requests on the part of developing country WTO Members for trade in services statistics-related technical assistance and capacity building in order that they might have better access to statistics for trade in services negotiations under GATS. Discussions on improvements of statistics for trade in services date back to the 1980s, during the time of the Uruguay Round under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks of the Interim Commission for the International Trade Organization (ICITO), the functional predecessor to the WTO.

The two principal objectives of ISTIA capacity building for developing country and LDC governments are as follows. Firstly, ISTIA seeks to provide training to trade negotiators and policymakers on the fundamentals of globalization statistics, that could provide them with a deeper understanding of their work. These comprise trade in services statistics, which could provide insight into the services trade under the GATS Four Modes of Supply. As well, FDI statistics and Foreign Affiliate Trade Statistics, or "FATS" are important economic indicators in this realm. FATS are corporate financial statistics, aggregated at the national level, describing the operations of FDI-based enterprises, being multinational corporations or transnational corporations; some examples of FATS include statistics on levels of employment, value-added, capital expenditures, inter- and intra- firm trade, as they relate to the economies where FDI-enterprises are based.

The second objective of ISTIA is to help national governments to improve the substance of trade in services statistics and FDI statistics by providing training on data collection methodologies which are conformant to International Monetary Fund (IMF) statistical standards, and recommendations of the United Nations Manual on Statistics on International Trade in Services (MSITS), created as a joint intergovernmental effort chaired by the OECD-Eurostat Inter-Agency Task Force on Statistics on International trade in Services. ISTIA technical assistance will help the over 120 developing countries which require this form of assistance, to meet IMF and other criteria, while providing governments with information which is more useful for negotiations and policymaking, and which private sector enterprises in developing countries and LDCs can use to make evidence-based decisions.

ISTIA also works with private sector enterprises and industrial consortia as well as with academic institutions around the world to forward a wider knowledge of the new field of globalization statistics.