Services in foreign trade of the United States.

摘要

There is a strong interlinkage between the service and manufacturing sectors. International competitiveness may arise from the ability to integrate services into the production and the exports of manufacturing goods.; This study first explores how free trade in services is superior to no trade in services, given that an industry can take advantage of the public-good property of producer services. Goods may be exported by country because it is well endowed with factors used relatively intensively in producing producer services, which are, in turn, relatively intensively embodied in goods. Using 1977 data for the United States, we have shown that there are high service embodiment ratios in U.S. exports of goods as compared to imports of goods. But the evidence was not significant when we tried to test the hypothesis that proportionate net exports of factors in the embodied services trade could reveal relative factor endowment with respect to the rest of the world.; Finally, when we compared factor content in net trade and consumption, inclusive of services, it is revealed that the U.S. was well endowed in capital relative to labor in both 1977 and 1986, a reversal of the Leontief paradox.