This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 19th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Services are often overlooked in trade negotiations in favor of higher profile trades in agriculture and manufactured goods.

So when we talk about trade and trade restrictions, how often are we talking about services, and can liberalization in the trade of services

be expanded?

Sally James, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, comments. Well, they're intangible things.

So a good is something you can drop on your foot.

If I buy a t-shirt, I can see it, I can touch it, I I get that it's got made in China written on it I

understand that but services are things that people provide and people are willing to

pay for so in that sense it's a good but it's it's not physical so if you

think about getting a haircut that's a service you pay for it and it's something

that adds benefit to your life but it's not something you could touch.

Taxi Services is an obvious example.

It's usually the one that's used along with haircuts

as an example of what we call kind of non-tradables in other words things that you could never exchange across borders

Okay, it's impossible to consumer taxi service produced in, say, Bahrain when you're living in London.

So I think that's one reason why maybe services trade is a little bit, if you like, I guess abstract to people it's it's not it's not something

they they touch and feel and work with every day now when candidate

Obama now President Obama talked on the campaign trail about shipping jobs overseas.

To what extent was he talking about services?

He was talking mainly about services.

He used the example of manufacturing, you know, a factory that unscrews the plant equipment and

...