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Abstract
This paper describes recent advances in research by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to better measure and analyze trade in services and global production. To provide new information on how services are supplied, BEA has prepared exploratory estimates of U.S. international services categorized by mode of supply and has begun to collect information on modes of supply from BEA survey respondents. BEA has also conducted research on the strategic movement of intellectual property assets by multinational enterprises (MNEs) and how it affects national and international economic accounts. One part of this research explores how large an impact this activity might have on measures such as U.S. domestic production, trade in services, and direct investment income. Another part of this research explores how U.S. MNEs use transfer pricing under cost sharing agreements to shift profits abroad. To better measure the globalization of production by domestic firms, BEA has also explored several approaches to creating supply-use tables extended by firm type that better illustrate heterogeneity in production by different types of firms in the same industry.