SUMMARY
Service Industries and Economic Performance addresses three questions that have troubled economists for more than a decade: whether service-oriented economies can sustain high rates of output growth; whether they can generate large numbers of good jobs; and whether they can compete effectively in global markets.
Compared with a generation ago, U.S. service industries now account for a larger share of real output, and a much larger share of employment. Service inputs also comprise more of the embodied value of all the goods and services Americans produce for final use.
Powerful forces now at work in the United States and elsewhere give these changes overwhelming momentum. Some of these forces are demographic—e.g., women's increased presence in the workforce and the aging of the population. Some reflect longterm public choices—e.g., deregulation, defense downsizing, public education and health care programs. Others arise from the relentless expansion of technical knowledge—e.g., advances in computer and communications technology that have permanently increased demand for a wide range of communications services and triggered explosive growth in the computer software industry.
STRUCTURAL CHANGE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
Recent experience prompts reasonable doubt about the growth potential of service-oriented economies. Since the 1960s, most G-7 countries have experienced a gradual slowing in average output growth , coupled with steady expansion in the services share of economic activity and, especially in the United States, a sharp decline in service-industry productivity growth.
The conclusion that service economies are naturally sluggish, however, is premature for at least three reasons. First, major strides must still be made in the way we conceptualize and measure service industry performance¾especially the magnitude and quality of many service outputs. Slow productivity growth in much of the service sector may be mainly a problem of perception.
Second, many factors blamed for the slowdown in service sector productivity growth are not inherent in the nature of service production itself, and their influence may have weakened over time. Compared with the 1960s, for example, many more U.S. workers have some post-secondary education. Teenagers and women who entered the labor force with relatively few skills in the 1970s are now more experienced. And new research suggests that, in some service industries, heavy investments in information technology since the mid-1980s have at last begun to yield high productivity returns.
Third, some U.S. service industries have been among the economy's most dynamic—e.g., transportation, telecommunications services, wholesale trade. High-productivity-growth service industries tend to have two things in common: deregulation and consequent exposure to the discipline of increased competition; and a capacity to exploit advances in information technology (IT) either by integrating these advances successfully into existing operations or using them to develop new services. In some cases (e.g., cellular telephony), the industries themselves are recent creations of the IT revolution.
SERVICE INDUSTRIES AND EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY
On average, wage rates in the service sector remain below those in other sectors, but the gaps are narrowing. Also, employment appears to be growing fastest in service industries where average wages are relatively high or in high-wage job categories of traditionally low-wage industries. These findings should help dispel concern that the shift to services will ultimately consign most Americans to undesirable low-wage jobs.
The evidence seems less reassuring, however, on the question of whether service industries are functioning the way manufacturing industries once did, as providers of wellpaid jobs for mid-skilled workers.
Similar uncertainty attaches to the capacity of service industries to accommodate economic adjustment. A comparison of employment changes in production job categories in manufacturing and services suggests that, despite rapid overall growth in service employment, service industries have been unable to compensate for job losses by manufacturing workers in the middle range of the blue-collar skills spectrum.
SERVICE INDUSTRIES AND BALANCED TRADE
U.S. experience since 1987 tends to support the widely-held view that service economies are structurally disadvantaged in global competition. Although the United States has built an impressive surplus in services trade over this period, much larger movements in merchandise trade have dominated the nation's overall competitive position.
The capacity of service industries to contribute positively to U.S. trade performance appears to be limited by the fact that services account for a relatively small and remarkably stable share of overall U.S. trade activity. One reason for this may be that many services marketed overseas (e.g., business, professional, and technical services) are not traded, but delivered directly by local affiliates of U.S. firms.
Given these historic relationships, it seems unlikely that the United States will be able to balance its current account through continued growth in the services surplus without also maintaining high levels of competitiveness in other sectors.