World Cup fans drove up U.S. service exports in June

Remember all those Scots who visited Boston for the World Cup? They wore kilts, drank a bunch of beer, and helped drive up U.S. service exports.

Service exports went up $1.1 billion in June from the month before, according to a new report from the U.S. Commerce Department.

“We welcomed a lot of tourists from overseas, and that's a good thing,” said Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics,

When people from abroad visit the U.S. and stay in hotels and buy tickets to soccer games, that’s considered an export because people from other countries are consuming U.S. services.

The June growth bucks a recent trend, Lovely said. Last year, the U.S. saw a drop in international visitors.

“The United States has always been a real tourist attraction for obvious reasons, right? We've got great things to see and do here, but the sense of America as being a welcoming place, I think, has changed,” Lovely said.

Another driver of service export growth in June was financial services, which includes things like underwriting, money management, and advising.

Cornell economics professor Nancy Chau said that’s part of a longer-term trend: “[It’s] really a reflection of the fact that the U.S. exports what it knows, right?”

Financial services are an industry that the U.S. is famous for. It’s one of the reasons that the U.S. actually has an overall trade surplus for services — meaning we sell more of them than we buy.