Then there’s tourism
Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2025 4:51 am
The lower-tech category of “technical, commercial and other business services,” which covers things like accounting and human resources, is another area of growth. Estonia and the Philippines lead the way, with such exports accounting for more than 5% of their GDP. Like India, the latter offers low labor costs, as well as a large English-speaking population. Workers in many countries also take casual online jobs. These are hard to measure, but two-thirds of freelancers working on English-speaking platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are based in emerging economies.
Not every country can replicate the temples of Japan or the beaches of Mexico, but many are finding ways to attract visitors, such as with medical services. Dentistry, hip replacements and hair transplants are among the treatments on offer. Costa Rica, Croatia and Moldova export health services worth between 0.2% and 0.5% of their economic output. Armenia and Jordan each manage 1%. A few hours at Istanbul airport provide a demonstration of the thriving industry, as men return home with their heads wrapped in plastic and their fresh hair rooting underneath.
In the short term, it seems likely that service fax lists exports will continue to grow. In 1992, Stan Shih, founder of Taiwanese computer maker Acer, coined the term “smile curve” to describe how value added in the manufacturing process increases faster in the first and third parts of a product’s production (design and distribution, respectively) than in the second phase (production). As manufacturing has become more competitive, the smile has deepened. Consider Apple, which designs and distributes iPhones and collects rent from its brand, but produces none of the technology itself. Its market cap is more than $3 trillion, while Foxconn, which makes 70% of the company’s iPhones, is worth just $99 billion. Even better, the rise of remote work has made companies much more comfortable with outsourcing. After all, a remote employee is not all that different from an outsourced one.
Not every country can replicate the temples of Japan or the beaches of Mexico, but many are finding ways to attract visitors, such as with medical services. Dentistry, hip replacements and hair transplants are among the treatments on offer. Costa Rica, Croatia and Moldova export health services worth between 0.2% and 0.5% of their economic output. Armenia and Jordan each manage 1%. A few hours at Istanbul airport provide a demonstration of the thriving industry, as men return home with their heads wrapped in plastic and their fresh hair rooting underneath.
In the short term, it seems likely that service fax lists exports will continue to grow. In 1992, Stan Shih, founder of Taiwanese computer maker Acer, coined the term “smile curve” to describe how value added in the manufacturing process increases faster in the first and third parts of a product’s production (design and distribution, respectively) than in the second phase (production). As manufacturing has become more competitive, the smile has deepened. Consider Apple, which designs and distributes iPhones and collects rent from its brand, but produces none of the technology itself. Its market cap is more than $3 trillion, while Foxconn, which makes 70% of the company’s iPhones, is worth just $99 billion. Even better, the rise of remote work has made companies much more comfortable with outsourcing. After all, a remote employee is not all that different from an outsourced one.