Premium
Identifying the Issues in Trade in Services
Author(s) -
Sampson Gary P.,
Snape Richard H.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
world economy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.594
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1467-9701
pISSN - 0378-5920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9701.1985.tb00421.x
Subject(s) - citation , library science , sociology , computer science
NTEREST in the nature and extent of government intervention in trade in services has grown rapidly in recent years. ’ From the domestic perspective the focus has been on the effects of government regulation on the distribution of resources and on consumer choice. From the international perspective the focus has been on government restriction of market access and barriers to trade in services. Because of the impact of government regulation of internationally-traded services, there have been proposals for the liberalisation of restrictions on service transactions, with strong pressure from the United States and some other developed countries, for the subject to be on the agenda of a new round of multilateral trade negotiations. But it is apparent that a conceptual framework for such negotiations is lacking and those engaged in discussion of services as a sector are not always working from a common base. In the absence of a developed ‘theory’ of trade in services, the theory of trade in goods has often been applied on an ad hoc basis. This follows from the suggestions by some economists that international trade in services is the same, from an analytical point of view, as trade in goods. But a host of very different types of services are traded internationally, ranging over computing services, shipping, insurance, medical services, tourism, construction, building design and banking. In order to examine the extent to which trade in services is ‘the same’ as trade in goods, a simple classification of traded services is developed in this article. It becomes clear that some services are very similar to goods; others are not. Policies relating to the movement of factors of production and to the movement of the receivers of services may distort trade in some services more than in the case of goods. Such policies may be of more importance to trade in services than restrictions on trade in the services themselves. Thus one purpose of this article is to identify the characteristics of international transactions in services which may distinguish them from international transac-