Abstract
The revolution of information and communications technologies has put service tasks with strong tradability characteristics at high risk of being offshored. This article reviews studies proposing indicators of service tradability, exploring the labour market implications of service offshoring and developing theories to rationalize the facts. It suggests that both skill intensity and tradability are determinants of wage and employment effects. Nonetheless, the lack of widely accepted definitions of tradability, the absence of high-quality data on service trade flows and the difficulty of measuring import competition at higher disaggregation levels pose difficulties in achieving further progress, pointing to areas for future research.