International services statistics strategy and coordination - problems and progress with price and volume measurement in the services sector

Abstract

OECD has a current project to coordinate international developments in services statistics. The project addresses the problems of how to make the coordination mechanisms more efficient, avoid duplication of effort, identify and ensure coverage of essential issues, and how to communicate conceptual/methodological outputs to all that need them. In the context of improving statistics on services generally, this paper asks some basic questions on why we need better measures of service prices and volumes. What are the obstacles to progress? What are the choices and priorities? What about quality and international comparability of the resulting statistics? Measurement problems exist and might sometimes be too difficult to be solved “properly”, nonetheless we should strive for an amelioration of methods, greater transparency and a degree of international harmonisation. Viewing this work from an international perspective, the paper outlines the progress achieved to date on services prices and volumes and suggests a mechanism to take the work forward. It reports on some recent progress on measurement of insurance output. In conclusion some discussion points on directions for future work are put forward.