Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The OECD cross-section sectoral indicators measure regulatory conditions in the professional services and retail distribution sectors. The professional services indicators cover entry and conduct regulation in the legal, accounting, engineering, and architectural professions. They are now estimated for the years 1996, 2003, around 2008 and 2013 for 34 OECD countries and for another set of non-OECD countries for 2013. Users of the data must be aware that they may no longer fully reflect the current situation in fast reforming countries. Not all data are available for all countries for all years.

The OECD STRI is a unique, evidence-based tool that collects information on services trade restrictions across 22 services sectors. The project has two distinct but complementary instruments: a services trade regulatory database and a services trade restrictiveness index. Based on the qualitative information in the database, composite indices quantify the identified restrictions across five standard policy categories, with values between zero and one. Complete openness to trade and investment gives a score of zero, while being completely closed to foreign services providers yields a score of one.