The biggest is travel, which accounted for $204 billion last year. This is an area that the president should know well. When a Canadian couple stays in a Trump hotel in New York, the money they spend counts as a service export.

The next biggest category is “charges for the use of intellectual property,” a category that includes foreigners who pay to watch movies or music made in the United States, as well as licenses of patents and trademarks.

Other big ones include financial services, insurance, telecommunications and information technology, and a wide range of engineering and other consulting services.

If you have a mental model in which the only valuable jobs involve making steel or mining coal, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the middle-income jobs that are more common in the 21st-century service economy. Examples include the blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, the nurse at a hospital renowned for its cancer treatments, the audio technician on a movie set, the engineer who advises companies worldwide on the best way to extract oil.

The share of global spending that went toward services rather than goods rose from 50 percent in 1970 to 80 percent in 2015, researchers from the Federal Reserve found in a recent paper. Those service-producing jobs are more the economic present than most types of goods-producing jobs. And all signs point to that being more true in the future.

That’s because even in many industries that make physical goods, information makes up a bigger and bigger part of the content of that good. A car isn’t just a chassis and an engine, but millions of lines of computer code that make it all work efficiently. The advent of driverless cars will accentuate this. In the future, few people may buy cars; instead, they may rely on transportation services.

Some of these lines are a little arbitrary. A worker in a Campbell’s Soup factory works in manufacturing, and when that soup is shipped to Canada, it counts as an export of goods. If that same worker instead made soup in a restaurant that sold it to a Canadian tourist, it would become a service export instead.