Cost disease in service sector

A higher growth rate of the service sector prices, rather than prices in the manufacturing sector, through time is known as cost disease in the service sector. This paper investigates supply and demand-side reasons for cost disease. First, we present an analysis of the supply side of the cost disease, when services and manufacturing play their role both in the intermediate and final demand. Second, we consider a CES utility function for the consumer, which is a function of two commodity services and manufacturing. The results indicate that there are two reasons for cost disease to occur from the supply side in an economy: first, when the growth rate of total factor productivity and technological progress in services is less than that in the manufacturing sector, and second, when the elasticity of substitution between labor and manufacturing input in the services production function is large and elasticity of substitution in manufacturing production function is small. From the demand side, the result shows that the cost disease occurred if the growth rate of the income elasticity of service is more than the manufacturing sector through time.     

服务模块化对物流企业的创新分析

物流业是一种融合运输业、仓储业、货代业和信息业等行业的新兴复合型服务产业。随着国内经济的快速发展和市场需求的不断扩大,物流产业已成为促进国民经济增长的一个非常重要的服务部门。与此同时,越来越多的消费者希望物流企业能提供多样化、一体化的服务,服务创新正成为提升物流企业竞争力的重要路径。本文利用服务模块化的思想,将物流企业所提供的服务进行模块化分解,并提出创新型的服务体系,拓宽我国物流行业的服务网络,力求提高我国物流企业的服务水平。     

休闲经济与流通休闲化研究

随着我国经济的快速发展,经济休闲化和休闲社会化对国民经济的发展产生了重要影响,消费者对于休闲服务与休闲产品的需求也经历了从少到多,从简单到多样的发展变化。为适应休闲经济的发展要求,流通产业必须对自身原有的发展模式进行变革,将传统流通产业的流通业态、流通目的、流通环境、流通过程、流通服务等进行一系列的休闲化改造和创新。     

Formal Employment and Informal Work in Household Services

This article discusses whether employment increases are likely in household services. The conclusion is that until recently, employment increased due to a shift of service work from households to the formal economy (especially the public sector). The growing number of childless or single parent households means a growing demand for services from the formal economy. Still, it seems likely that the service employment growth will slow down and be substituted by work in the informal economy, due to the cost increases in the formal economy connected with low productivity growth in service activities.     

Petty services,profit‐led growth and rural–urban migration in a developing economy

This paper develops a structuralist urban dual economy model for a developing economy consisting of a capitalist formal sector and a “petty” or informal service sector. The petty service sector plays an important role in wage determination and capital accumulation in the formal sector. The urban dual economy is situated in the midst of a rural area endowed with generous amount of surplus labour. The rural area augments urban labour supply over time through rural–urban migration. The paper, therefore, incorporates rural–urban migration within a structuralist framework and highlights its implication for growth and structural change in urban spaces of developing economies riddled with persistent formal–informal duality.     

‘BAUMOL'S DISEASE’, PRODUCTION EXTERNALITIES AND PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS OF INTERSECTORAL TRANSFERS

This paper presents a model that introduces in an unbalanced growth framework à la Baumol the hypothesis of an endogenous productivity growth due to a positive externality of the service sector on manufacturing productivity and a learning‐by‐doing process inside both sectors. The model shows that a policy aimed at keeping the ratio between outputs in the two sectors constant in real terms may improve the aggregate productivity performance of the economy, depending on the parameters' values. Then the model derives the dynamics of the intersectoral transfer which is necessary to keep the ratio between outputs constant, and verifies that the amount of the transfer turns out to be always lower than the output of the manufacturing sector, and only asymptotically approaches it.     

中国生产者服务业的增长、结构变化及其影响——基于投入-产出法的分析

本文采用投入-产出方法,在生产者服务的本来意义上,而不是从具体的带有生产者服务特性的服务部门出发,对中国生产者服务业的增长、结构变化及其影响进行经验研究,由此得出一些基本结论:1981年以来,中国生产者服务业在国民经济中的地位逐步上升,服务业的生产者服务功能逐渐显现,但与英、美等国相比,中国生产者服务占国民总产出比重偏低;中国服务业及其有关分部门与国民经济其他产业或部门的前后向联系效应相对较弱,说明中国服务业的增长不仅不能对国民经济产生应有的带动作用,而且其本身受其他部门的需求拉动作用也不大.     

Productivity growth and cyclical behaviour in service industries: the Spanish case

A longstanding basis of empirical economics is that average labour productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms, and thus behaves procyclically. In the short run, in many countries output growth and productivity tend to move together and across a wide range of industries. In recent years, this observation has gained increased prominence as each proposed explanation for the observed procyclicality has important implications for modelling the business cycle and measuring the technical change. By filtering out the influence of business cycles, it is possible to isolate changes in the long run, or structural rate, of productivity growth and so assess the importance of any source for economic growth. Nevertheless, the focus of these empirical works has been the aggregate economy or manufacturing industries, and not the services sector. The novelty of this paper is the focus on the patterns within the services sector. The aim of this paper is to better understand short-run changes in productivity growth within the service sector industries, which are necessarily different from those existing within the manufacturing sector. Another goal of this research is to assess whether this observed procyclicality remains if the service sector is the scope of analysis, and whether this is homogeneous among the different activities within this miscellaneous sector or not. Empirical evidence for the Spanish economy since 1980 is presented.     

Spatial spillovers and employment growth in the service sector

This article examines the impact of local knowledge spillovers on employment growth in the service sector at both the theoretical and empirical level. It is argued that, in addition to life cycle and tradability effects, spillovers in services are likely to be strongly influenced by distinctive service characteristics and labour-related factors, which impact on the channels through which spillovers are transmitted. Empirical models of employment growth suggest significant differences in spillover effects between industry and services and across public, private, business and personal services. In particular, many services appear to benefit from spillovers arising from a diverse local economy.     

后国际金融危机时期上海休闲产业升级研究

作为经济发展的新增长点,休闲产业在拉动城市消费、扩大就业及调整产业结构等方面具有特殊的推动作用。本文介绍了休闲产业的范畴及影响因素,分析了上海经济结构的特点及休闲产业的发展现状,并提出了在后国际金融危机时期上海休闲产业升级应采取的对策。2008年爆发的国际金融危机对上海休闲产业带来了巨大冲击。面对后国际金融危机时期复杂的经济形势,客观上要求上海加快经济增长方式转变和产业结构调整,进一步完善和升级休闲产业结构。     

Relationship between Inflation and the Comparative Evolution of Wages in Industry and Services within the Spanish Economy

A large body of empirical literature ascribes a high degree of responsibility by the service sector for the difficulties in lowering inflation in the Spanish economy in the 1980s and early 1990s. Despite the fact that most of the branches in this sector are characterised by their lower ability to increase productivity, service wages have increased at a similar rate to those of other activities that, however, have been able to generate constant growth in productivity. On the other hand, tertiary activities have been able to transmit the growth in wage costs to prices without this having significant repercussions on the amount demanded as they are more protected from international competition. In this context, the reasons why service growth is accused of being one of the key causes of price growth are understandable. Nevertheless, throughout the1990s, important changes have taken place due to the technological revolution of modern economies that have created a doubt that services are still for the most partly protected from competition. This article makes a comparative study of the evolution of wages in industry and services, finding initial evidence that tertiary wages are presenting in their evolution the lowest productivity of most of tertiary activities pressurised by greater competition, which is lowering the incidence on inflation of the sector and of the economy in general.     

Simulating evolution of interindustry linkages in endogenous dynamic IO model with layers of techniques

In this article, we propose a new version of dynamic input–output model in which both technological progress and deployment are endogenous, and where sector‐specific outlays on R&D speed up the development of new technologies and the installation of capital stock. In this two‐technology model, the new and old technical processes within a sector exchange their relative weights in production. We use the model to obtain projections of the interindustry linkages of sectors in the Polish economy over the next 50 years. The results of this simulation suggest an ongoing change of the composition of the set of key sectors of the Polish economy. In general, one may expect to see an ongoing drop in the importance of agriculture‐ and heavy‐industry‐related sectors on the one hand, and a rise in the importance of services‐related ones on the other.     

Impact of services trade on economic growth and current account balance: Evidence from India

This paper aims to study the impact of services trade on India’s economic growth and current account balance during the post-reform period. Earlier studies on this subject have mostly looked at the goods sector. Indian studies which analysed services-led growth from a balance of payments perspective suffered from a bias of having focused only on call-centre exports. In such a context, this study brings in a novel approach by using the Balance of Payments Constrained Growth model and autoregressive distributed lag cointegration to estimate the balance of payments equilibrium growth rate for India’s service sector. The key service sub-sectors are also identified using input–output tables and the TIVA database. This study finds that India’s service sector is growing at a rate almost equal to its balance of payments equilibrium growth rate under the assumption of constant relative prices in international trade, and at a rate lower than the equilibrium growth rate when this assumption is relaxed. Among the major services in India’s export basket, construction, transport and business services are found to exhibit strong backward linkages. Foreign value-added content in India’s services exports is found to be highest in the case of business services, transport services and telecommunications.     

Trade in Services and TFP: The Role of Regulation

What determines total factor productivity (TFP) growth in services: is it services trade or services–trade regulation? To respond to this question, we use four indicators of international trade in services since 1990 to 2005, namely foreign direct investment (FDI) inward stock, services imports, domestic sales of foreign affiliates (FATS) and FDI inflows, to examine what type of services trade forms a direct determinant. Subsequently, we analyse what type of sector‐specific regulation has played an inhibiting effect on services TFP growth. Such analysis contrasts with former studies in which mainly factor inputs and economy‐wide regulation are used to explain services TFP. This paper provides evidence that neither trade nor entry barriers are robust determinants to explain cross‐country differences. Instead, regulations on operational procedures affecting the variables costs structure of the firm seem to play a more important role in explaining TFP growth between countries, particularly in combination with information and communication technology (ICT) capital.     

新技术下服务产品“虚拟化”探究

产品"虚拟化"的服务业可以有效地摆脱困扰服务业的鲍莫尔"成本病"的影响,实现生产率的快速增长。本文通过一个双头博弈模型,借助"自助服务外包给顾客"的形式说明了"虚拟服务"大大优于现在占据主体服务市场的实体"柜台"服务,"虚拟服务"将取代实体"柜台"服务,从而实现服务业"产业化"经营的目标。     

Trade in Services: The Elasticity Approach for The Case of Turkey

This study includes the analysis of global trade in the services and service sector in Turkey, and estimates the elasticity of trade in services to real exchange rates and income. There is an increasing role of the service sector in the Turkish economy; however, a decreasing trend of trade in services is taking place. The commitments of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) were found to be ineffective, at least in the case of Turkey. The empirical findings suggest that the real exchange rate is not a significant determinant for the trade in services. We found an inelastic real exchange rate and income elasticities in trade demand functions. However, the value of income elasticity significantly exceeds the value of real exchange rate elasticity.     

Tourism development,environmental pollution and economic growth: A theoretical analysis

We develop a two-sector dynamic model of a less-developed economy with an imported traded good sector and with a non-traded tourism service sector serving international tourists. Revenue earned from tourism finances imports. The model takes care of the negative effect of tourism development on environmental pollution. Environmental quality and capital stock accumulates over time. We analyse comparative steady-state effects and show that tourism development raises the level of capital stock as well as national income but lowers the quality of environment in the new steady-state equilibrium leading to a relative expansion (contraction) of the capital (labour) intensive non-tourism (tourism) sector. Pollution abatement policy produces a completely opposite effect; and so tourism development policies are to be accompanied by pollution abatement policies in order to ensure green growth.     

More guilt re services: toward a more inclusive view

It appears to be implicit in most research about the service sector that services are only produced in the private sector. This brief note submits that to calculate service output for the whole economy, the services produced in the public sector by national, regional and local governments must of necessity be included. This enhanced calculation demonstrates that service-producing industries are a much larger proportion of total economic activity than has been realised, and may, in the US for example, constitute around 80 per cent of total employment.     

The Externalisation of Producer Services Debate: The UK Computer Services Sector

This article uses a variety of evidence from the UK computer services industry to inform debates surrounding externalisation processes and the nature of growth in contemporary producer service sectors. While it has been argued that growth in such industries is predominantly demand-lead and independent from the disintegration of businesses in client sectors, in the computer services sector the direct transfer of activity from client firms to independent computer service providers is an increasingly important component of growth at an aggregate, national scale. Growth in this segment is being fuelled by the de-regulation of public sector IT procurenment in the UK.     

Trade and Innovation in Services: Evidence from a Developing Economy

Studies on innovation and international trade have traditionally focused on manufacturing because neither was seen as important for services. Moreover, the few existing studies on services focus only on industrial countries, even though in many developing countries services are already the largest sector in the economy and an important determinant of overall productivity growth. Using a recent firm‐level innovation survey for Chile to compare the manufacturing and ‘tradable’ services sector, this paper reveals some novel patterns. First, even though services firms have on average a much lower propensity to export than manufacturing firms, services exports are less dominated by large firms and tend to be more skill intensive than manufacturing exports. Second, services firms appear to be as innovative as – and in some cases more innovative than – manufacturing firms, in terms of both inputs and outputs of ‘technological’ innovative activity, even though services innovations more often take a ‘non‐technological’ form. Third, services exporters (like manufacturing exporters) tend to be significantly more innovative than non‐exporters, with a wider gap for innovations close to the global technological frontier. These findings suggest that the growing faith in services as a source of both trade and innovative dynamism may not be misplaced.