Author: Yesheng Guo

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

Services has long been the largest sector of the global economy. In 2011, it produced over 70% of the worlds GDP and employed nearly 50% of the worlds labor force. In the United States, those shares were around 80%. Meanwhile, total imports of services reached 6% of the worlds GDP, almost 1/3 of total goods imports, and it has been steadily growing at 2.63% per annum since 1995, 54% faster than goods trade. Despite its solid presence, services trade is still missing in most existing trade studies. It is often taken as a closed outside sector whose main purpose is to complete the equilibrium. The goal of this thesis is to demonstrate the importance of services trade to our understanding of comparative advantage and welfare implications of trade. In particular, I will introduce services trade and related data sources, provide benchmark quantifications of the gains from services trade, investigate the evolution of comparative advantage of services industries over time, and discuss how trade in services can interact with market entry and technology to generate interesting labor reallocation across sectors.The main results can be summarized as follows. First, standard gravity models fit services trade well. This allows us to apply the widely popular Eaton and Kortum model to services and estimate services productivities. Second, in a series of counterfactual experiments, the same amount of technological progress or friction reduction in services will lead to 3 to 4 times higher gains from trade than in manufacturing. Next, by estimating productivities for 35 industries, 17 in services, from 1995 to 2000, we found that while comparative advantage was weakened in all sectors, relative convergence among services industries was 75% faster than manufacturing industries on average. Such convergence eliminated 3.9% potential gains from trade from the median country, and reduced total trade volume by 25%. In addition, we estimated the speed of technological diffusion across industries within each country to be 3.6% and that across countries for every industry to be 6.0%. Last but not least, inspired by the negative correlation between trade intensity and employment share found in the swift labor reallocation from manufacturing to services in the U.S. since 2000, we discussed how interactions between entry choice, skill-biased technology, and trade may give rise to interesting patterns of structural transformation.This thesis offers basic quantifications of the macro impact of services trade on welfare and structural transformation. From these basic quantifications, we can infer that promoting services trade will unlock considerable amount of potential gains, much higher than the gains from goods trade. At the same time, strengthening services comparative advantage could further hurt employment in other sectors, particularly manufacturing. Fortunately, the manufacturing comparative advantage of the non-OECD countries has diminished in recent decades, reducing the relative cost of re-industrialization that US and other OECD countries are pursuing. Finally, as more granular services trade data becomes available, better economics and econometrics tools can be applied to improve our quantification and deepen our understanding of services trade for policy considerations.