Australia's Service Sector: A Study in Diversity
Staff research paper
Australia’s Service Sector: A Study in Diversity by Rosalie McLachlan, Colin Clark, and Ian Monday, was released on 13 March 2002. The paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of Australia’s service sector, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the economy's output and for four out of every five jobs, and the important role it plays in the economy. As well it identifies and discusses key changes over the last 20 years or so, looking at the relative performance of different service industries in terms of employment, productivity, trade and investment; and the shifting role of services in economic activity and the extent to which links between service industries and the rest of the economy have changed. And finally it explores: the underlying determinants of changes in the service sector; the notion of ‘productivity drag’; the types of jobs created by the growth of services; what service trade means and why some services are becoming more tradeable. Also see:
Related publications include:
- Productivity in Australia's Wholesale and Retail Trade
- Restrictions on Trade in Professional Services
- Restrictions on Trade in Distribution Services
- The Growth of Non-Traditional Employment: Are Jobs Becoming More Precarious?
- Achieving Better Regulation of Services
- Multilateral Liberalisation of Services Trade
- Australia's Restrictions on Trade in Financial Services
CONTENTS
Preliminaries
Cover, Copyright, Contents, Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, Key Messages, Overview
1 Why study Australia’s service sector?
1.1 Myths and misperceptions
1.2 Objectives of the study
1.3 Structure of the paper
2 Defining and classifying services
2.1 What are services?
2.2 Classifying services
3 The role of services in the economy
3.1 The importance of the service sector
3.2 Growth of the service sector
3.3 Why have services grown so rapidly?
3.4 Services outlook
4 Jobs in the service sector
4.1 The service sector - where most Australians work
4.2 Trends in service employment
4.3 Service jobs - the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ jobs debate
4.4 The diversity of service employment
5 Trade in services
5.1 How tradeable are services?
5.2 The growth in international service trade
5.3 Australia's service trade
5.4 Impediments to growth in services trade
6 Service sector performance
6.1 Measuring productivity for services
6.2 Service productivity - what the numbers say
6.3 International comparisons
A Alternative approaches to classifying services
References
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