The table below updates the estimates of cross-border trade in services between U.S. parents and their foreign affiliates by type of service that were first collected in the 1994 benchmark survey of U.S. direct investment abroad and that were first published in this article last year. Similar detail on services trade between foreign parents and their U.S. affiliates was first collected in the 1997 benchmark survey of foreign direct investment in the United States; those data will be published next year in Foreign Direct Investment in the United States: Final Results From the 1997 Benchmark Survey.

As shown in the table, more than three-fourths of receipts and about two-thirds of payments are in the "Other" category. A significant portion of this trade may be accounted for by overhead expenses, such as management services and research and development assessments, that are allocated among the various divisions or parts of an enterprise.

In the past year, on the basis of the detail on affiliated services by type of service, BEA identified and removed certain transactions from "Other private services" that had also been implicitly included in the transportation accounts, thus eliminating a small amount of double-counting in the estimates. The adjustment was made to the estimates for 1994 forward.