Complementarity of Inputs across Countries in Services Trade

This article argues that trade in certain services has a specific feature that does not necessarily apply to goods. In those services, the production process ends in the country where thez are eventually consumed (i.e. in the importing country). Hence, we propose that services trade must use interactively inputs from both exporting and importing countries and thus, should be affected in the same manner by their respective costs. We test our analytical framework using a macro dataset on bilateral trade in services and a specific industry dataset on Air passenger non-policy factors affecting the use of inputs in both the exporting and the importing country have a symmetric impact on the bilateral flow of services between those countries.