Services Sector Growth : What Does it Mean?

 
Nov 16th 1999

Services constitute a very heterogeneous economic category, and it is one which has become more difficult to define over time. Older definitions of services tended to rest on the fact that services were often difficult, if not impossible, to separate from the service-provider and recipient, so that people became crucial to the definition. More recent definitions have incorporated "business services" which also externalise part of R and D and management functions, and include activities like retailing, banking and insurance, and administration.
 
For Adam Smith, a service was defined in terms of its transient nature, thus they were seen to "perish in the very instant of their performance". The simultaneity of production and consumption in services provision led Smith to argue that they "seldom leave any trace or value behind them". Since this meant that they could neither be stored nor transacted again, they amounted to unproductive activities for most classical economists.
 
Similarly, until very recently the national accounts data of socialist or centrally planed economies tended to make a distinction between material and non-material production. Those services (such as trade and transport) that contributed directly to material production were also classified as such themselves, while other services remained in non-material production. Even such a distinction was not entirely clear-cut, because of the possibility of longer-term effects of some services on material production, but the basic distinction between productive and unproductive economic activities was maintained.
 
Modern sensibility has tended to stand such reasoning on its head, giving tremendous importance to a range of services in terms of their potential for raising productivity in other economic activities. One recent definition treats a service as " a transformation of the user or the user's goods, as a result of the voluntary intervention by the producer of services". [T. P. Hill, 1977] This does not imply an acquisition which is transferable, but rather a modification of the characteristics of the recipient, and it allows for a variety of different interpretations, incorporating both person-based services such as education or health care, and goods-based services such as in transport and R and D.
 
The expansion of the services sector has always been seen as a necessary concomitant of economic growth, to the point where it is often listed as one of the indicators of the economic development process. The theory underlying such an assumption (which was elaborated by economists like Kuznets, Clark and Fisher) was one which viewed development as a three-stage process, with the primary, secondary and then tertiary (or services) sectors becoming more dominant in successive phases. Typically, therefore, a rise in the share of services in national income was viewed as being positively associated with both economic growth and quality of life.
 
At a very broad level, such an assumption would appear to be confirmed by the evidence on the share of services in national income across a range of countries, as presented in Chart 1. With the highest share of services being found in the industrial countries, and the lowest in the least developed countries, the basic argument seem to be quite plausible.
Chart 1 >>
 
This theory in turn was based on certain assumptions about both production and consumption. First, in terms of production, productivity gains - or changes in value added per worker - were assumed to be faster in material production, especially in industry, than in services. Second, in terms of consumption, it was assumed that the income elasticity of demand for services was greater than that of demand for goods.
 
The assumption of differences across material and non-material sectors in terms of productivity growth was taken as axiomatic for many years. However, it is now increasingly widely recognised that making any such statement is problematic, not only because of the sheer difficulty of measuring productivity in the service sector, but because of the many links between growth and technological change in industry and services.
 
Measuring productivity in any economic activity requires at the very least, some knowledge of the quantities produced. For some services, there are indeed some basic production indicators (the number of haircuts given, the number of cheques processed, the number of telephone calls made) but even these are not always comparable because of issues of quality variation. But for a whole range of other services, even such indicators are not available, and calculations of output are then made on the basis of input volumes, which can help us very little when it comes to productivity measures. Often, there are various kinds of ad hoc assumptions made in estimating output, and the estimates tend to be quite sensitive to the particular assumptions made.

 
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