Manual on Statistics of International Trade in Services

9. Other business services 
3.122. The coverage of other business services is 
identical to the coverage of the BPM5 component; 
however, the disaggregation proposed is more detailed 
than that of BPM5, although it corresponds broadly to 
the BPM5 supplementary breakdown.  
3.123.  Merchanting is defined as the purchase of a good 
by a resident of the compiling economy from a non-
resident and the subsequent resale of the good to another 
non-resident; during the process, the good does not enter 
or leave the compiling economy (changes in stocks held 
abroad by merchants are excluded from the estimation of 

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merchanting services). The difference between the value 
of goods when acquired and the value when sold is 
recorded as the value of merchanting services provided. 
Although the goods flows associated with merchanting 
activity are not part of services statistics, separate data 
recorded on a gross basis, including the value of the 
goods, are useful for analytical purposes, and a separate 
memorandum item, merchanting gross flows, is 
included in EBOPS for this purpose.