Trade in Online Services: Education and Health - International ...

This is from a new Peterson Institute paper:

In a recent book, The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn?t, William Baumol reports some arresting numbers to illustrate the spiraling cost of key services which are plagued by slow productivity growth. Since the 1980s, the price of US university education is up by 440 percent and health care by 250 percent, while the consumer price index has only increased by 110 percent. Projecting these numbers, and taking into account demographic aging, Baumol warns that the United States could be spending 60 percent of its GdP on health care by 2105. One answer to this arithmetical juggernaut is dramatically liberalized trade in education and healthcare, taking advantage of every technology on the horizon: distance learning, medical tourism, diagnosis and record-keeping from abroad, and?more.

I've written about trade in online education here; I've just started researching online trade in health care services. ?I agree that these are two areas where more international trade could have enormous benefits, to help get these high costs down, and it would be great if trade negotiators were able to make some progress on liberalizing here.

Source: http://worldtradelaw.typepad.com/ielpblog/2013/04/trade-in-online-services.html

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