World trade in services has recently been a little under $US2 trillion, about a quarter of world trade in goods. That ratio does not appear to have changed much in the last 50 years. For the US, exports of services have recently been over 40% and imports about 20% of exports and imports of...

A particularly serious problem of measurement is the growing transfer of intangible US corporate assets to foreign affiliates of US firms, some of which use virtually no foreign factors of production. These transfers, mainly for tax saving purposes, give rise to phantom flows of services from...