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Abstract

While it is evident that employment in services now dominates the U.S. economy, we still have relatively little understanding of the spatial structure of trade in services. This situation is in part a legacy of our historic tendency to focus on the markets of manufacturing and primary production sectors on the theory that they are ldquobasic.rdquo However, the great expansion of services employment in our economy in recent decades means this assumption needs reexamination. This paper reports the results of interviews with 2,200 service sector firms in the Central Puget Sound region, exploring their degree of export orientation. These interviews show a striking degree of export orientation within these sectors. This study suggests that interregional trade in services is probably extremely important in the economic base of all major metropolitan regions.

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