Global Trade in Services Fear, Facts, and Offshoring [Paperback]

J. Bradford Jensen, senior fellow, is professor of economics and international business at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He is also a senior policy scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has been affiliated with the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2003, serving as deputy director from 2003 to August 2007. Before joining the Institute, he served as director of the Center for Economic Studies at the US Census Bureau and on the faculty of the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University.The service sector is large and growing. Additionally, international trade in services is growing rapidly. Yet there is a dearth of empirical research on the size, scope and potential impact of services trade. The underlying source of this gap is well-known—official statistics on the service sector in general, and trade in services in particular, lack the level of detail available for the manufacturing sector in many dimensions. Because services are such a large and important component of the US economy, understanding the implications of increased trade in services is crucial to the trade liberalization agenda going forward. In this path-breaking book, J. Bradford Jensen conducts primary research using a range of data sources to produce the most detailed and robust portrait available on the size, scope, and potential impact of trade in services on the US economy.

Jensen presents new evidence on the prevalence of service firm participation in international trade. He finds that, in spite of US comparative advantage in service activities, service firms' export participation lags manufacturing firms. Jensen evaluates the impediments to services trade and finds evidence that there is considerable room for liberalization—especially among the large, fast-growing developing economies. lS“