Services Trade Restrictiveness Index

In the recent services trade restrictiveness index (STRI), India’s rank improved a notch to 47 from 48 among 50 countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Highlights –

• The 2022 STRI of India is above the OECD average and high compared to all countries in the STRI sample.
• India had been progressively introducing reforms over the past years, contributing to a slight liberalisation of services trade in some sectors, most notably between 2018 and 2021.

About the Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) –

• It was launched in 2014 and provides information on regulations affecting trade in services in 22 sectors across all member countries.
• The regulatory database and indices are updated annually in December.
• There is also a Digital STRI that identifies, catalogues, and quantifies cross-cutting barriers that affect services traded digitally.
• Scoring — This index takes values between zero and one, one representing a totally closed and zeros a fully open sector.