Internationalization of Commercial Services: Global Dispersion

Recent world trade statistics emphasise rapid globalisation of commercial services (CS) and underpin the criticality of a country’s positioning strategy in the growing world CS market. Drawing on trade statistics of 77 countries, this paper assesses configurations and composes a matrix of CS internationalisation as a framework to classify and map countries in the world CS market. Overall the study differentiates between countries based on the structures of country export and CS trade ratios. Key findings are that there are the two distinctive patterns of country CS internationalisation among the G7 countries, and that the country CS trade success (measured by CS trade balance per capita) appears to be determined by a country’s CS internationalisation mode.