Trade in services is often hampered by domestic administrative barriers, even when countries are members of the same regional trade agreement. We exploit a large reform in the European Union (the EU Service Directive) aimed at reducing such administrative hurdles in cross-border service provision to estimate its effects on service trade. We employ a triple-difference strategy and a Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood panel approach to estimate gravity equations with multiple fixed effects. On average, the reform increased intra-EU trade in targeted services between a lower bound of 29% and an upper bound of 67%, translating into an overall welfare increase between 0.39% and 1.32% for the member states. This effect of the reform on service trade is corroborated by several robustness and sensitivity checks. Besides the cross-border trade creation effect, we show that there is trade diversion at the cost of domestic flows. Furthermore, a disaggregated analysis reveals significant differences between countries and service sectors.

中文翻译：

---

减少服务贸易的繁文缛节

服务贸易往往受到国内行政壁垒的阻碍，即使各国是同一区域贸易协定的成员。我们利用欧盟的一项大型改革（欧盟服务指令）旨在减少跨境服务提供中的此类行政障碍，以估计其对服务贸易的影响。我们采用三重差分策略和泊松伪最大似然面板方法来估计具有多个固定效应的重力方程。平均而言，改革将欧盟内部有针对性的服务贸易增加了 29% 到 67% 的上限，这意味着成员国的整体福利增加了 0.39% 到 1.32%。多项稳健性和敏感性检查证实了改革对服务贸易的这种影响。除了跨境贸易创造效应外，我们还表明以国内流动为代价存在贸易转移。此外，分类分析揭示了国家和服务部门之间的显着差异。