REGIONAL COOPERATION AND ECONOMIC INTEGRATION

SOME ASPECTS OF TRADE STATISTICS AND REPORTING
This we will elaborate in the next part of our paper.
But due to global financial crisis world export as well as world production have declined
significantly and were below the IMF projections for 2007. The most prominent is the
decline in international trade in goods while international trade in services show more
resilience to effects of the global economic crises. The flows of foreign direct investment
show also the resilience to the first effects of the global economic crises. The FDI in 2007
were 1 833 billion USD which was a rise of 40% in FDI flows comparing to the previous
year. But if we analyse the situation of specific economies with a large inflow of foreign
capital in the form of FDI we can observe that most of transnational companies in the
period of global crises were trying to salvage its parent companies, mainly located in
developed countries mostly affected by crisis, redrawing the capital from even successful
and profitable not affected by crisis.
Foreign trade statistics that is in use in almost all countries in the world today records all
sales of goods made abroad as exports and all purchases of goods made abroad as imports.
The most important thing is that customs authorities record the movement of goods across
national boundaries as official trade flows. Goods have a physical substance so they are
visible when they cross borders and easily recordable. Goods are still the dominant objects
that are exchanged internationally and they account for about 75% of total world exports
according to 2006 IMF data (Bjelić, 2008a). Customs authorities record trade flows using
so called Harmonized System classification of goods in international trade. This data
afterwards need to be recalculated according to Standard International Trade Classification
of goods (SITC rev. 3) that is in use internationally for statistical purposes.
But services are not as visible as goods and their trade is usually referred as invisible trade.
Trade in services statistics is value according to payments that are connected to execution
of services abroad. This payment is recorded in Balance of payments of each country in
the world. Many services that are executed abroad are not entered into official statistics
because their related payments are in many cases unrecorded. Foreign direct investments
are also recorded in Balance of payment as financial flows but from this data we can not
determine their connection with classical trade flows. We can only distinguish inflows from
outflows of foreign direct investments.
When official statistics records export or imports it records sales and purchases of all
Serbian companies abroad. These Serbian companies can be under control of nationals of
our country or they can be controlled by foreign companies so they are affiliated of a parent
company incorporated abroad. Under Serbian law, and law of many other countries, all
this companies are Serbian companies, registered in Serbia and required to operate under
Serbian law.
This classical concept of foreign trade statistics is correct since it observes customs territory
of a country as a central point and records all trade activities with other territories in the
world, using the concept of transnationality of goods movement and not the transnationality
of business activity. But increasingly more flows of goods and services in international trade
are either replaced or complemented with investment flows within TNCs. The activities
183