In the drive to double America’s exports, Washington has been focusing on manufacturers. But that may be the wrong target.

With an educated work force, a culture of innovation and strong capital markets, the United States has a larger comparative advantage in high-skilled services like engineering, law and finance than in lower-skilled manufacturing jobs that rely on cheap labor.

For these reasons, economists see tremendous potential for growth — if, that is, Washington helps clear the way.

“There is for some reason this manufacturing fetish in America that is not consistent with U.S.’s fundamental economic interests.” said Aaditya Mattoo, the research manager at the World Bank. “Meanwhile, there are these barriers which American services companies face in establishing abroad, and no one talks about them.”

Under current policy, manufacturing companies enjoy special tax cuts and other subsidies, and can count on the government to protest when American goods face unfair tariffs. For example, when India passed tariffs on alcohol imports that tripled the price of Jack Daniels whisky, the United States fought back. But to this day India requires New York Life Insurance to give three-quarters of its Indian profits to a local partner, Washington does not intervene.

As the developed world has gotten wealthier, global demand for skills and services — especially the higher-end ones — has risen.

In the United States, services increasingly dominate the economy. Employment in this sector has risen steadily since the 1960s, with 70 percent of Americans now working in service industries.

And America already exports more services than any other country in the world, even more than the next two competitors combined. In 2011, that amounted to $612 billion exported in services, up 10.1 percent from 2009, and up 136 percent since 1991.

Still, there is great untapped potential for more, since all of these exports are being sold from a tiny share of all the American companies that could participate in the global marketplace.

“There is this huge infrastructure boom where these big, fast-growing economies are going to need to build out their roads, sewers, telecommunications networks, factories, airports, harbors, you name it,” said J. Bradford Jensen, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and author of a recent book on global services trade. “All those projects require armies of architects, engineers, project managers, financial insurers. These are all the kinds of tradable services that we have an advantage in providing.”

Given these opportunities, Mr. Jensen estimates that the United States has the potential to more than double its annual exports of services annually, creating an additional $800 billion in tradable business services like engineering and law alone. (“Tradable” refers to services that can easily be done across borders, as opposed to work like cutting hair or drawing blood.)

Meeting this potential in business services would support or create about three million jobs, by his estimate. These jobs pay significantly higher wages than manufacturing jobs, even when controlling for how educated workers are and other demographics, he added.

To some extent American companies are staying at home because of cultural or language barriers, worries about intellectual property protection and corruption, and sometimes lack of interest.

Often, though, countries ban or place quotas on services from abroad that make these imports prohibitively expensive. One 2010 study estimated discrimination against services imports in some of the major emerging markets like China, India and Indonesia was effectively equivalent to a tariff on these imports of more than 60 percent.

In Malaysia, for example, 80 percent of television programming must originate from local production companies owned by ethnic Malays. Brazil has similar quotas for movie screenings.

In other cases, foreign laws make it extremely expensive or complicated for American entrants. In India, foreigners are not allowed to own more than 26 percent equity in an insurance company, regardless of how much the local partners provide.

“Taking a minority shareholding and doing 100 percent work doesn’t hold up for us,” Ajit Jain, who heads Berkshire Hathaway’s reinsurance business, told an Indian newspaper last year. The company opted to sell another company’s insurance products through a Web site rather than to expand its own underwriting business in India. Mr. Jain did not return calls from The Times.

China has many similar partnership requirements, along with other limits on foreign businesses. For example, the government tightly restricts the routes of planes operated by foreign delivery services.

“There’s a very narrow band of space we can fly in,” said Daniel J. Brutto, the president of U.P.S. International. “If there’s bad weather in China, our planes are not going anywhere. That means our deliveries will take longer.”

Other American companies have been comparably restricted, if they can get into the country at all.