In the era of economic globalization, the opening up of the service industry has become the main way for all countries to participate in international economic cooperation and competition. Global trade in services has to respond to huge challenges, but also have rare opportunities for development.
In recent years, the global trend of service-oriented, integrated manufacturing has shed light on development of services trade. The multilateral trading system under the World Trade Organization (WTO) is constantly refined to follow the new trend towards global trade liberalization.
The three major categories of service import and export in 2017 were tourism, transportation, and other business services. Other business services replaced the building industry as the third largest services trade in terms of imports and exports.