A message from the Director-General, Pascal Lamy

To balance options and base decisionmaking on facts, analysts need to be able to gauge the impact of their interaction with the rest of the world. Firms need to know their competitive position in international markets. To this end, policy-makers, experts and the public at large rely on international trade statistics and trade policy information. The remarkable efforts by national statistical institutions over the last decade has led to considerable progress in enhancing availability of information, in particular statistics on trade in services. This publication is an illustration of these improvements.