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x · services trade
Services trade: the quiet half of globalization
BACI records goods crossing borders. But commercial services, travel, transport, ICT, finance, consulting, are now roughly one quarter of world exports, growing faster than goods, and concentrated in a handful of high-income and English-language economies. The data below are from World Bank WDI balance-of-payments services tables (OECD EBOPS 2010 categories, IMF BPM6 presentation). Baldwin (2019, Globotics Upheaval) argues that remote-delivered services are now tradable on the same margins as goods; Loungani et al. (IMF WP 17/77, 2017) show the compositional shift from travel/transport to modern business services is what has driven the headline growth gap.
world services exports 2024$8.65T
world goods exports 2024$22.83T
services share of total27.5%
services CAGR 1995-20247.6%
goods CAGR 1995-20245.3%
Method. Services aggregates are BX.GSR.NFSV.CD (commercial services exports, BoP, current USD) and BM.GSR.NFSV.CD (imports). Category shares (BX.GSR.TRVL.ZS, BX.GSR.TRAN.ZS, BX.GSR.INSF.ZS, BX.GSR.CMCP.ZS) follow the IMF BPM6 / OECD EBOPS 2010 services classification; they do not sum to 100 because government services, maintenance and construction are reported separately and omitted here. Goods are BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28) total_exports multiplied by 1,000 (BACI stores thousands USD). Country filter: drops EMU, AFE, AFW aggregates to avoid double-counting regions as members.
Figure 1
World services vs. merchandise exports, 1995-2024
Services exports grew from $1.03T in 1995 to $8.65T in 2024, a CAGR of 7.6%, against 5.3% for merchandise. The services share of combined goods+services exports rose from 16.9% to 27.5%, the trend Francois & Hoekman document in their survey of the services-trade literature.
Source: World Bank WDI (BX.GSR.NFSV.CD for services, BoP basis) and CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28) (goods, f.o.b.). Francois & Hoekman (2010), 'Services Trade and Policy,' Journal of Economic Literature 48(3): 642-92.Figure 1b
Services share of world exports (services ÷ services+goods), 1995-2024
Source: WDI (services) + CEPII BACI (goods). Ratio computed year by year.
Who earns the most from services exports
Loungani, Mishra, Papageorgiou & Wang (2017) show that modern services trade is concentrated in advanced economies that have specialized in knowledge-intensive, digitally delivered services: finance, management consulting, business process outsourcing, software, legal and accounting work. Only a handful of emerging economies, India and the Philippines most prominently, have cracked the top tier.
Figure 2
Top 20 services exporters, 2023
Services-intensive economies
Ghani & O'Connell (2014) ask whether services can be a development escalator in the way that manufacturing historically was. One signature is the ratio of services exports to merchandise exports: a country that sells more services than goods abroad is plausibly running a services-led external model. Small open economies (Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta) and English-language service hubs (UK, Ireland, Philippines, India) dominate the ranking.
Figure 3
Services exports as a share of merchandise exports, top 20 (2023, services ≥ $10B)
What each leader sells
Services are not a monolith. Eichengreen & Gupta (2013) argue that India's services growth is overwhelmingly business services, ICT, finance, professional outsourcing, not the traditional tourism-plus-transport pattern of low-income services exporters. The shares below (% of total services exports) bring that distinction out: Ireland and India are dominated by telecom/computer/business services; Spain and Singapore lean heavily on travel and transport; the UK has a uniquely large insurance-and-financial component.
Figure 4
Composition of services exports, top 10 economies, 2023
Economy
Travel
Transport
Insurance & finance
Telecom/computer/business
USA
18%
9%
19%
35%
United Kingdom
13%
7%
25%
19%
Germany
8%
21%
13%
42%
Ireland
2%
3%
10%
79%
France
19%
17%
12%
37%
China
8%
26%
2%
34%
India
Who runs services surpluses and deficits
Because services trade is concentrated in advanced producers, surpluses cluster there too. Goods-surplus economies (China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Japan) are typically services importers: they pay for shipping, tourism, licensing, and consulting. The WTO's 2024 World Trade Report emphasizes that services imbalances are structural, tied to endowments in human capital and regulatory openness rather than to exchange-rate adjustment.
Figure 5a
Top 10 services-surplus economies, 2023
Figure 5b
Top 10 services-deficit economies, 2023 (shown as absolute values)
Has services trade concentrated or spread out?
Goods trade has broadly democratised across three decades as emerging producers joined the world export base. Services are the harder case: the same five or six economies that sat at the top in 1995 sit there still. Looking at the top-5 share of world commercial services exports year by year makes the point directly.
Figure 5c
Top-5 services-exporter share of world exports, 1995-2023
In 1995 the top five services exporters controlled 50.5% of world commercial services exports; by 2023 that share was 36.3%, a shift of -14.2pp. The club stays recognisable (US, UK, Germany, France, China, Ireland rotate through the top five) and the tail never really catches up, a persistence that Loungani et al (2017) trace to human- capital stocks and regulatory openness, both slow-moving.
Source: World Bank WDI (BX.GSR.NFSV.CD). Top-5 computed year by year across all non-aggregate iso3 reporters. Authors calcs.
The digital-services oligopoly: where the ICT+business export base actually sits
Stripping out traditional travel and transport, the 'modern services' block, computer, communications, information, and other business services (WDI indicator BX.GSR.CCIS.CD, which maps to EBOPS-2010 items 9 (telecommunications, computer and information services) plus 10 (other business services) on the BPM6 BoP presentation), is remarkably concentrated. Four economies, Ireland, India, the United States and the United Kingdom, together dominate the world market, with the Philippines as the rising challenger from the BPO/KPO corridor. Baldwin (2019, Globotics Upheaval) calls this the tele-migration frontier; Loungani et al (2017) document the same top-tier in their new services dataset.
Figure 6
ICT + business services exports: world concentration, 2023
Digital-services exports as a share of GDP: the tele-migration map
Scaling ICT+business services exports by each economy's GDP strips out the size effect and surfaces the economies whose productive structure is most digital-services-leveraged. It is the closest readily available proxy for what Baldwin (2019, Globotics Upheaval) calls the tele-migration frontier: economies where a material fraction of GDP moves as cross-border digitally delivered services. The ranking is dominated by profit-shifting hubs at the top (Ireland, Cyprus, Luxembourg), a measurement artefact Tørsløv, Wier & Zucman (2022, Review of Economic Studies) document directly, with Estonia, Israel, Singapore and India behind them as genuine tradable-services producers.
Figure 7
Digital-services exports as % of GDP, top 20, 2023
Services-export intensity across the income distribution
Levels and concentrations are one cut; another is intensity per unit of GDP. Eichengreen & Gupta (2013, Oxford Economic Papers 65(1): 96-123) showed that services-export intensity rises with income but the slope is steeper for the second wave (modern business services) than the first (tourism, transport). Below, we hold each country in its 2015 GDP-per-capita quartile (NY.GDP.PCAP.CD) and trace the cross-country mean of commercial-services exports as a percent of GDP (BG.GSR.NFSV.GD.ZS, BoP basis) over 1995-2023. Holding the quartile fixed isolates basket-share change from reclassification.
Figure 8
Commercial-services exports as % of GDP, by 2015 income quartile, 1995-2023
The United States alone accounts for roughly 13% of world services exports; the top five together account for about 36%. Ireland's ranking reflects US multinationals booking software and IP-licensing revenue through Irish affiliates, a long-running measurement controversy in the BoP data.
Source: World Bank WDI (BX.GSR.NFSV.CD). See Loungani, Mishra, Papageorgiou & Wang (2017), 'World Trade in Services: Evidence from a New Dataset,' IMF Working Paper 17/77.
Among economies with at least $10B of services exports, the top of the list is dominated by tourism hubs (Macao) and financial centres (Luxembourg, Cyprus). The United Kingdom (111%) and Ireland stand out as large advanced economies whose services already rival or exceed merchandise. India's ratio (77%) is striking given its manufacturing base.
Source: World Bank WDI (BX.GSR.NFSV.CD, BX.GSR.MRCH.CD). See Ghani & O'Connell (2014), 'Can Service Be a Growth Escalator in Low-Income Countries?' World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6971.
10%
9%
3%
57%
Singapore
6%
31%
16%
24%
Netherlands
7%
17%
7%
62%
Japan
18%
15%
8%
52%
Share of total services exports by category (BoP). 'Telecom/computer/business' (CMCP) captures modern digital services; 'insurance & financial' (INSF) captures finance; 'travel' captures tourism receipts; 'transport' covers shipping and aviation. Rows do not sum to 100 because government services and 'other' are omitted.
Source: World Bank WDI (BX.GSR.CMCP.ZS, BX.GSR.INSF.ZS, BX.GSR.TRVL.ZS, BX.GSR.TRAN.ZS). See Eichengreen & Gupta (2013), 'The Two Waves of Service-Sector Growth,' Oxford Economic Papers 65(1): 96-123.
The United States runs by far the largest services surplus ($283.3B), driven by IP-licensing, finance, travel, and business services. The UK, India, Spain, Turkey and the UAE follow. India's surplus comes almost entirely from IT and business services outsourcing.
Source: World Bank WDI (exports minus imports of commercial services, BoP). See WTO (2024), World Trade Report: Services.
China runs the largest services deficit in the world (-$208.5B), dominated by outbound tourism and IP-royalty payments. Germany, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Russia, Korea and Japan follow, all major goods exporters whose external surplus is partially offset by services imports.
Source: World Bank WDI (imports minus exports of commercial services, BoP). See WTO (2024), World Trade Report: Services.
Ireland, India, the United States and the United Kingdom together account for 8% of world ICT+business services exports in 2023 ($539.1B out of $7.17T). The Philippines (n/a) sits , a small fraction of the top-four block but the only emerging-market member of the BPO/KPO corridor at scale. Ireland's position is inflated by US multinational IP-licensing routing through Irish affiliates (Tørsløv-Wier-Zucman 2022, Review of Economic Studies, on profit-shifting via intangibles).
Source: World Bank WDI indicator BX.GSR.CCIS.CD (computer, communications and other services, current USD, BPM6 BoP). Excludes aggregates EMU/AFE/AFW. See Loungani et al (2017), IMF WP 17/77; Tørsløv, Wier & Zucman (2022), "The Missing Profits of Nations," Review of Economic Studies 90(3): 1499-1534, on Ireland's role as a profit-shifting hub.
Ireland tops the ranking at 43.5% of GDP, a figure that reflects US multinational IP-licensing and software-royalty flows routed through Irish affiliates (Tørsløv-Wier-Zucman 2022). India sits at 4.5%, the Philippines at n/a, the BPO/KPO corridor showing up as a meaningful share of domestic GDP. The United States, despite being the largest absolute digital-services exporter, sits at only n/a of its much larger GDP base; the services frontier is a bigger share of small open economies than of the US.
Source: World Bank WDI. Indicators: BX.GSR.CCIS.CD (computer, communications and other services, current USD, BPM6 BoP) and NY.GDP.MKTP.CD (GDP, current USD). Filter: CCIS exports >= $500M. Tørsløv, Wier & Zucman (2022), "The Missing Profits of Nations," Review of Economic Studies 90(3): 1499-1534.
The lowest quartile moved from 12.8% of GDP in 1995 to 13.3% by 2023; the highest quartile moved from 22.1% to 52.8%. The middle two quartiles tracked each other, consistent with the Eichengreen-Gupta second-wave reading: services-export intensity is now substantial across the income distribution rather than confined to the top, and Q3 economies (the upper-middle wave including India and the Philippines on this 2015 cut) close the gap with the top quartile faster than the GDP-per-capita gap closes.
Source: World Bank WDI BG.GSR.NFSV.GD.ZS (commercial services exports as % of GDP, BoP). Quartiles via NY.GDP.PCAP.CD 2015 snapshot, held fixed across all years. Cross-country means within quartile, equal-weighted. Cites Eichengreen & Gupta (2013) Oxford Economic Papers 65(1): 96-123 and Loungani et al (2017) IMF WP 17/77.