In 2023, the trade of the EU’s international supply of services was worth €5 933 billion. EU countries exported €3 269 billion worth of supply services to countries outside of the EU, while imports from countries outside the EU stood at €2 664 billion, marking a positive balance of €605 billion.
Looking at the 4 different modes of supply, commercial presence registered by far the highest surplus worth €469 billion accounting for 77.5% of the total surplus, ahead of cross border supply (€65 billion; 10.7%), presence of natural persons (€40 million; 6.6%) and consumption abroad (€35 billion; 5.8%).
This information comes from data on EU trade in services including the first ever official data on supply of services via commercial presence (Mode 3), published by Eurostat today. This article presents only a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.
Source dataset: ext_ser_mos
Commercial presence: USA, UK and Switzerland leading trade partners
Regarding commercial presence, EU’s leading trade partners for international supply of services were the United States (€486 billion; 27.1% of extra-EU exports) and the United Kingdom (€268 billion; 15.0%), ahead of Switzerland (€215 billion; 12.0%).
Source dataset: ext_ser_mos
The United States was also the origin of most services imported into the EU from non-EU countries via commercial presence (€564 billion; 42.6% of imports), followed by the United Kingdom (€218 billion; 16.4%) and Switzerland (€114 billion; 8.6%).