Introduction

The virtualization of work has increased the opportunities for global organizational collaboration several fold. Organizations today rely on supply chains that criss-cross the globe in the creation of both manufactured goods and services. Several large emerging countries such as China, India, and Russia, have embraced open trade and investment policies adding billions of workers to the global talent pool with implications for employment in both developed and developing nations. Global outsourcing and offshoring have exploded, enabled by new technologies in information processing, communication, and transportation. As Blinder (1988) noted, it is important to consider the dynamics of employment resulting from changes in international trade policies. For just as in the 1980s, when blue-collar workers began to see jobs shift to locations in Mexico and South Korea, today, white-collar service jobs are moving to countries like the Philippines and Poland. Moreover, changes in trade policies do not have the same effect on all occupations and sectors (Cohen and Zaidi, 2002). Some view these changes in the labor market as more harmful to national economies than manufacturing offshoring, because of the high-value jobs involved.

This chapter examines business, professional, and technical service (BPTS) and information technology (IT) service exports to the United States from a group of twenty-nine countries in a search for the country-level determinants of trade in these high value-added services.