This paper aims to analyse the changes in the role of services in the external trade context. First, it focuses the development of the technological and productive restructuring bases, preceding the process of internationalization of services, that resulted in this transformation. Following, it examines the economic conditioning of service internationalization, which led to the revision of the non-tradable nature of these activities, and it analyses the diversified dynamics of this process in countries of several levels of development. Finally, it discusses the regional effects caused by this process of international diffusion of service commercialization.
Services; international trade; technological progress; imports; exports