In a piece about Rolls-Royce, the Economist notes:
In practice, there is no clear line between what counts as a service and what has been made. Look closer and those burger-flippers work on a small assembly line. Rolls-Royce’s designers, salesforce, analysts and financial-support staff are hardly different from their counterparts at ARM, which gets other people to make its microprocessors. The distinction owes more to government statisticians than anything else.
The overlap between goods and services will be familiar to most of this blog's readers, I would guess. Many, perhaps most, goods have a services aspect (distribution, if nothing else). Is it possible that some day we will get rid of the artificial distinction in their international regulation by merging the GATT and the GATS?
