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ld help explain the observed higher labor productivity performance in services in the former. The question explored in the rest of this paper is whether these services developments are determinants of the aggregate growth performance of countries. The services oute variables are of course endogenous, in?uenced by the policy stances of governments, so that the focus is on the impact of services policy reforms. While signi?cant progress has beenmade by many transition economies in services reforms, there is also substantial crosscountry heterogeneity in terms of liberalization and the quality of the regulatory framework for key “ backbone‖ services. Differences in policy reforms are re?ected by differences in FDI in is con?rmed by the correlation coef?cients in the Appendix Table A1 relating investment climate and the bined service sector reform variables to the stock of FDI as a share of higher coef?cient for the services reformvariable relative to the investment climate indicator is suggestive of the 4 important role servicerelated policies may play in attracting FDI. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether reforms have had a positive effect on output growth for the countries under consideration. Standard economic growth theory postulates that growth is a function of capital and labor inputs. It accords no special role to services. Services play a more prominent role in the literature on ?nancial sector development (see Levine 1997 for a survey), which recognizes that ?nancial intermediaries do not simply passively convert savings into physical investment. Instead, temporary or permanent growth effects of capital accumulation and productivity improvement are supported by ?nancial intermediaries (banks, capital markets) that actively mobilize savings and channel these toward pro?t maximizing investment opportunities. Another strand of the growth literature that (implicitly) emphasizes a services dimension stresses the importance of human capital in generating growth. The role of producer services of the type captured by the infrastructure services reform index in the growth process has not attracted much attention in the theoretical or empirical growth literature. Francois (1990) develops a model that points to the importance of such producer services for economic growth, although his model is not argues that the increasing importance of producer services in modern economies re?ects economies of scale and specialization. As ?rm size increases and labor specializes, more activityneeds to be devoted to coordinating and organizing the core businesses of a pany. This additional activity is partly outsourced to external service providers. The asso