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The OECD is on the cutting edge of trade. Whereas before we would argue about tariffs,
lowering the duties that we charge on products like cars, and books, and paper clips that
we send back and forth, now we're looking at trading services, and the OECD has created
new index to look at how restrictive countries are, where the barriers to trade in services
like accountancy and architecture and some of the new things that we can't really move
across borders but that we need to measure, in order to liberalize those services and
remove the barriers to them around the world. Services are very important to our economies,
in the United States and in other OECD members, and the services trade restrictiveness index,
the STRI, is an important tool for our policy makers and negotiators to use to get rid of
these barriers and have an open economy for services. The OECD is also looking at trade
in value added, it's a different way of measuring trade. We used to measure trade in whatever
you move from country X to country Y, the entire value of this product was measured
in terms of trade. But now we're just measuring the value added that came out of a particular
country, so if, for example, all of the the technology and intellectual property and patents
that came from the United States but it's built in China, China doesn't get all of the
credit for the entire value of the iPad or the computer or the garment, the design and
the thought behind it comes from the United States. And then maybe the advertising comes
from the European company that does this, and by measuring the value added in these
trade flows, we're better able to address the policies that will encourage more trade,
that will encourage more prosperity, create jobs, and be able to track what's happening
around the world.