The OECD STRI is a unique, evidence-based tool that collects information on services trade restrictions across 22 major services sectors.

The project has two distinct but complementary instruments: a services trade regulatory database and a services trade restrictiveness index.

The regulatory database contains laws and regulations collected from 46 countries: the 35 OECD Member economies, Russia and key partners (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa), as well as countries having accession discussions with the OECD.

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.

The STRI was first launched in 2014, and has been updated annually since then.

The STRI is different than most OECD statistical datasets since it builds primarily on qualitative information collected from laws and regulations which are then turned into quantitative data.

For each policy measure, the database records an answer, a supporting legal source and additional clarifications, if necessary.

Each entry is answered on the basis of laws and regulations currently in force. These are collected and analysed by the Secretariat from official and publicly available sources for each country (e.g., official gazettes, legal repositories, etc.).

Measures are assigned a score of zero if not restrictive and one if restrictive.

Logical connections and hierarchies between the measures are reflected in the overall scoring as well, ensuring that the STRI accurately depicts the joint effects of various policy measures.  

The outcome of the scoring is a composite index that provides a snapshot of trade restrictiveness in a country and sector at a particular point in time.

Furthermore, the STRI indices provide comparable information across all countries, and lend themselves to a wide range of research and analytical purposes, allowing new and innovative insights into trade costs equivalents of restrictions, regulatory heterogeneity, and so on.

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Frédéric Gonzales is a Trade Policy Analyst  in the Trade and Agriculture Directorate of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD.

He has been working in the OECD for the last ten years in the field of trade policy and economics. Throughout these years the focus of his research has been in the area of trade in services and on non-tariff barriers to trade in goods.

Since September 2008, he has been one of the key members of the team developing the OECD services trade restrictiveness index or STRI.

The project aims at quantifying restrictions to trade in services and provide a tool for assessing openness or restrictiveness to inform policy making.

Frédéric Gonzales was born in Lima, Peru and has French nationality. He received his Masters in statistics from West Britany University in Rennes.

I summarize the lessons from the research we have been conducting regarding the construction of ESG indexes.

I first summarize the discrepancy paper, where we identify that 50 percent of the discrepancy is coming from the measurement problem, and 50 percent t from the aggregation rules, then I summarize some of the areas where we are working trying to improve measurement - areas such as household stress, hostility toward women in the work force, human trafficking, etcetera. Then, I summarize our newer research thinking about the aggregation rules used by the rating agencies.

Two problems are highlighted, the rules reflect rating agency specific values, and they tend to be linear (in practice).

I argue why both are incorrect approaches.

Finally, I talk about transparency and data sharing, and the need to estimate the preferences among seemingly unrelated issues - such as the ones that are consistently incorporated in ESG measurement.

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Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Applied Economics at the Sloan School of Management, MIT, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a visiting professor at IESA.

Roberto is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. Currently he works on measurement of economic and social responsibility variables. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats. He is one of the founding members of the Aggregate Confusion Project.

Roberto joined the business school in 1997. He got his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and his BS in Electrical Engineer from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984. He is married with three kids.