Understanding The Service Economy

Manufacturing-led development has provided the traditional model for creating jobs and prosperity. But in the past three decades the conventional pattern of structural transformation has changed, with the services sector growing faster than the manufacturing sector. This raises critical questions about the ability of developing economies to close productivity gaps with advanced economies and to create good jobs for more people. At Your Service? The Promise of Services-Led Development (www.worldbank.org/services-led-development) assesses the scope of a services-driven development model and policy directions that can maximize the model’s potential.

Monograph comprising an economic analysis of trends in the service sector in the USA, with particular reference to employment implications - covers consumer demand and consumer expenditure, productivity, employment creation (according to sex, occupation and industry) and location in urban areas, and considers issues relating to growth of services, postindustrial society and outlook for employment opportunity. References and statistical tables.

With a foreword by Alex Osterwalder. The future of work is already here. Customers are adopting disruptive technologies faster than your company can adapt. When your customers are delighted, they can amplify your message in ways that were never before possible. But when your company’s performance runs short of what you’ve promised, customers can seize control of your brand message, spreading their disappointment and frustration faster than you can keep up. To keep pace with today’s connected customers, your company must become a connected company. That means deeply engaging with workers, partners, and customers, changing how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. It requires a new way of thinking about your company: less like a machine to be controlled, and more like a complex, dynamic system that can learn and adapt over time. Connected companies have the advantage, because they learn and move faster than their competitors. While others work in isolation, they link into rich networks of possibility and expand their influence. Connected companies around the world are aggressively acquiring customers and disrupting the competition. In The Connected Company, we examine what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and why it works. And we show you how your company can use the same principles to adapt—and thrive—in today’s ever-changing global marketplace.

Acclaim for the first edition: ÔThis is a well-written, provocative book, featuring much new material, original data analyses and interesting insights. Despite the proliferation of books on various aspects of services, there is nothing quite like it around. In particular, examination of the challenges that the growth of services presents to conventional economics is very valuable.Õ Ð Ian Miles, University of Manchester, UK ÔThis is an intriguing book that contains many interesting ways of conceptualising service from the perspective of economics. It makes a number of important contributions to the academic literature. It is one of the very few books and it might even be the only book to be written by an economist on the economics of services Ð it is thus a pioneer work and is of value in that it attempts to bring together the work that economists have done on services.Õ Ð John Bryson, University of Birmingham, UK Despite the fact that services have overtaken industry in terms of employment and GDP in developed countries, rigorous economic study of the service sector remains seriously neglected. The first edition of The Economics of Services initiated a redress of this oversight. Fully revised and updated, the second edition of this highly acclaimed textbook should be required complimentary reading to mainstream microeconomics textbooks for graduate students of economics and for advanced courses in labour, urban and regional economics, economic geography and economic history. The text emphasizes the distinction between intermediate producer services and final consumer services. Many of the former are traded in global markets much like material goods in general, whilst the markets for consumer services are markedly local. This requires quite different micro-foundations in each case. Other key issues explored include the productivity development and quality of service measurements, and the key role of urbanization for service sector growth. The critical issues for the future of the real economy beyond the financial crisis are also analysed in depth, and the author illustrates how a better understanding of the nature of the service economy is necessary for policy innovation with a view to regenerating the welfare state.

A frequent complaint in literature is that services have been previously largely overlooked by innovation researchers and technology policy makers. Given the unarguable growth in the importance of the service sectors, increasing numbers of researchers and policy makers have taken a fresh look at service activities. Innovation Systems in the Service Economy: Measurement and Case Study Analysis presents contributions which increase the understanding of the role of services in the development of the division of labor in modern economics. This volume is devoted to the elaboration and understanding of the following two themes. First, service firms can be innovative in their own right, even though the process of innovation and the kinds of innovation may be different from those traditionally associated with manufacturing and other primary activities. Second, service firms and associated activities play an important role in the evolving division of creative labor which is constituted by modern innovative systems.

Services industries account for almost three-quarters of both gross domestic product and employment in Canada, a trend that Canada shares with other G-7 countries. Furthermore, the services sector has been responsible for most of Canada's employment creation and much of its productivity growth over the past decade and the sector's importance to the Canadian economy continues to increase. Thirty renowned experts contribute to this volume, which is aimed at better understanding the dynamics of Canadian services industries and identifying the types of policies most likely to improve their innovation and productivity performance.