The increasing importance of services expenditures and the dampening effect on global trade

[...]of the expansion of international trade and competition, consumers in rich and poor countries alike gained in terms of greater purchasing power, better-quality products, and more product varieties. [...]standardization of shipping containers (a process that began to accelerate in the 1960s) significantly reduced transportation costs and spurred trade in goods.1 Moreover, the rise in vertical specialization-the splitting up of production stages across country borders to take advantage of production efficiencies-contributed to the increase in trade relative to GDP.2 Large regions of the world industrialized and joined the global trading system: the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) in the 1970s and 1980s, Eastern Europe in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China in the early 2000s following its entry into the WTO. [...]prices of goods declined relative to services, resulting in services expenditures accounting for a larger share of total expenditures by both households and firms given that goods and services are complementary. [...]they estimate future openness based on their assumptions of global trends in structural change and trade costs.