Services - statistics
Services constitute the backbone of the EU economy. They include a wide variety of sectors, such as transport services, telecommunications services, professional services, financial services, postal and courier services, retail and distribution services, environmental services and tourism.
Trade in services represents more than a third of the EU’s total combined value of trade in goods and services. The importance of trade in services for the EU economy has been growing over the past decade, including its importance relative to trade in goods.
In 2023, the value of EU services exports reached €1 427 billion (+1.6% compared with 2022), while services imports amounted to €1 274 billion (+4.1% compared with 2022). This makes of the EU the world's biggest exporter and importer of services with about 25% of world trade in services.
In 2023, the top 5 destinations for EU exports of services were
- the United States (22.3%)
- the United Kingdom (19.6%)
- Switzerland (10.8%)
- China (4.1%)
- Japan (2.6%)
In 2023, the main services sectors exported from the EU were
- other business services - i.e., Research and development services, Professional and management consulting services, and Technical, trade-related and other business services (23,9%)
- telecommunication, computer and information services (20,7%)
- transport services (17,2%)
- travel services (12,6%)
- financial services (7,1%)
For comparison, total EU agri-food exports in 2023 reached €228.6 billion, amounting to slightly less than EU exports of transport services.
The EU is the largest investor in the world. Services represent more than 70% of the EU’s Foreign Direct Investment abroad.
Statistics on international trade in services presented on this page come from Eurostat and record the services transactions that occur between residents of EU Member states and residents from non-Member countries.
These statistics provide the monetary values by type of service and by partner country, based on the transactions recorded under a country’s balance of payments.
For further statistics on international trade in services, please consult the following links:
- look up the annual EU trade EU trade in services by partner and sector (Source Eurostat BOP_ITS)
- look up more information on statistics for trade in services
- look up the database for statistics for trade in services
- look up the variations in trade in services by Member State
- look up the methodology used to produce the statistics