The World Trade Organization (WTO) released a report on trade in services recently, saying that global trade in services grew by 25 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2021, keeping pace with the growth of trade in goods, with digital deliverable services such as computers, financial and business services being the main drivers of growth. The surge in freight rates saw global transportation services grow 45 percent year-on-year and 12 percent compared to the same period in 2019.
As global trade in services in the third quarter of 2021 was still 5% lower than in the same period of 2019, the latest growth does not yet represent a full recovery to pre-pandemic levels, the report said. International travel continues to be affected by uneven global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, the emergence of a new mutant strain of novel Coronavirus and national border restrictions. The recovery has been fuelled by a surge in consumer demand for some goods as a result of lockdown measures and fiscal stimulus measures in advanced economies. But bottlenecks at ports, misallocation of global containers and delivery delays caused by surging demand and covid-related restrictions have further pushed rates up sharply. In the third quarter of 2021, Asian transport exports grew 71% year-on-year and 46% compared with the same period in 2019.
The recovery in air travel continues to lag and remains well below pre-pandemic levels, according to the report. Global international traveler spending in the third quarter of 2021 was up 54% year-over-year from a low base in 2020, but still 52% lower than 2019. Compared to pre-pandemic levels, European countries had the lowest decline, at 32 percent, due to the relaxation of travel restrictions across the continent in the summer of 2021. By contrast, Asian tourism exports are down 81% from pre-pandemic levels as some countries remain closed.
Other services, including construction, entertainment, legal and financial services, grew by an average of 15% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2021. As a group, these services were less affected by the pandemic, with exports shrinking by just 1% year-on-year in 2020.
Computer services continued to grow strongly in the first three quarters of 2021, with cumulative exports up 34% from the same period in 2019. Rapid growth was seen in both developed and developing countries, with us computer services exports up 29 per cent, Mauritius up 42 per cent, Ireland up 51 per cent, Ukraine up 63 per cent and Bangladesh up 68 per cent.
Internet traffic peaked during the pandemic. According to estimates by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), global Internet bandwidth increased by 30% in 2021. However, in the first three quarters of 2021, compared with 2019, telecom service fees decreased by 4 percent, reflecting a steady decline in global telecom service prices, especially those of bundled communication services.
Construction continues to be one of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic. Global construction exports fell 18% in 2020 and 12% in the first three quarters of 2021 compared with the same period in 2019. Construction exports from the European Union and China, the world's largest builders, fell 19 percent and 4 percent, respectively, from 2019. Much of the decline was caused by rising prices as steel and Labour faced supply chain bottlenecks and led to construction projects being delayed or cancelled.
According to the latest data, the cumulative value of services exports between January and November 2021 remained below 2019 levels in many economies, with Australia recording the biggest drop of 35 per cent. Morocco and Uganda in Africa saw service exports fall by 20% compared with 2019. By contrast, service exports in China and South Korea rose 37 per cent and 12 per cent respectively, supported by transport services. Other Asian economies such as Pakistan and India are exporting more services than pre-pandemic levels thanks to computer services.
