Economics

EU International Trade in Services in 2006 EU external surplus grows to €68.5bn

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Services are increasingly important in modern economies. In 2006, their shares of EU-27 gross value added and employment were 69.6% and 68.6% respectively (Eurostat database). Recent decades have witnessed a steady rise in their importance to the EU economy. The strong and growing role of services is not reflected in international trade. Due to the intangible nature of trade in services, this sector is inherently subject to more constraints than trade in goods. However, with the increasing tradability of large parts of the service economy, trade in services is now growing at a similar rate to trade in goods and is thus growing at a substantially higher rate than GDP. The expansion of trade in services has continued to outpace the growth in service sector output by a sizeable margin. Since the 1990s, growth in the export of goods and services in the EU has evolved in a broadly similar pattern with both growing by about 6.2% per year on average. Consequently services maintained their roughly 22% share of overall international trade during this period. However, in 2006 – as chart 1 shows - service exports lagged behind goods exports for the fourth year running. In 2006, the gap widened considerably, with exports of services growing at a significantly lower rate than exports of goods (6.9% against 9.3%).

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Publisher

: ., 2008

Collation

1-8

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

1977-0316

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NONE

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Subject(s)

EU International Trade in Services in 2006 EU exte

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