The Increasing Interdependence between Trade in Goods and Trade in Services. Recent Trends in Global Services Flows

This paper aims to highlight some of the recent developments in global trade in services. It sets out three main objectives. Firstly, to analyse the increasing interdependence between global trade flows in goods and services against the background of rapid expansion of global production networks (GPN) managed by transnational corporations (TNCs) - the dominant form of organization of global production and trade. It also points out that when international trade is measured in terms of value added instead by means of conventional statistics based on gross flows, services play a far more important role in global trade. Secondly, the paper aims to capture the dynamics of international trade flows in services at the regional level and emphasize the power shift from developed countries towards the developing and emerging ones. Thirdly, it intends to shed light on the important changes that have occurred in the structure of global trade in services under the impact of GPN, pointing to the rapid increase in modern services at the expense of traditional services, such as tourism and transport. The last part of the paper concludes.