The 1980s taught us that manufacturing jobs could escape U.S. unions, labor laws, tort lawyers, and environmental regulators much more easily than we had realized. The wings and the cockpit of McDonnell Douglas's MD-95 are being built in South Korea. To be sure, most U.S. jobs, particularly the services that account for 54 percent of the U.S. economy, are still in nontradable sectors. If you live in Fresno, you can not easily get a haircut from a coiffeur in France. But services do already make up over 20 percent of global trade, and they represent the fastest growing component of both trade and foreign direct investment worldwide.
American companies outsource data entry to countries in the Caribbean.
U.S. insurance, tax consulting, and accounting companies send claims and forms overseas for processing. Software, films, music, finance, advertising, and even health care and education all move as well. The Boeing way of choosing labor is now embedded in the structure of some 39,000 large, transnational corporations, which collectively hold over 2.7 trillion dollars of assets outside their home-base countries. New foreign direct investment in the 26 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development rose by 53 percent in 1995, while outflows from these countries increased by 42 percent. Again, information and communications technologies are the critical new lubricant.