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Productivity in Services

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

George F. Ray
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Extract

The service industries—that is, all activities apart from agriculture and the production and construction industries—account for more than half of gross domestic product and employ about two thirds of the civilian labour force. The size of the employed labour force alone makes a brief analysis of productivity worthwhile; additional interest stems from the importance of the contribution of the internationally tradeable services to the balance of payments.

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Articles
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National Institute Economic Review , Volume 115 , February 1986, pp. 44 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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References

(1) ‘United Kingdom National Accounts—Sources and Methods’, Studies in Official Statistics, no. 37, CSO, HMSO 1985. See also CSO, Industry Statistics, Occasional Paper, no. 20, May 1984.

(2) M.S. Levitt and M.A.S. Joyce, ‘Measuring output and produc tivity in government’, National Institute Discussion Paper, no. 108.

(3) We are grateful to the CSO for having supplied some of the details.

(4) The only source from which to estimate this is the report on the 1980 DE/OPCS, ‘Women and employment survey’ published in J. Martin and C. Roberts, Women and Employment—A Lifetime Perspective, HMSO, 1984. Detailed data on the average number of hours usually worked by part-time female workers are given on page 34 of that publication. The weighted average of the hours of work of part-timers in the occupational groups mainly working in services is 45.2 per cent of the average hours of those working full time. However, the survey results exclude those working irregular hours; the majority of these employees work in services and therefore the full-time equivalent has been reduced to 40 per cent. This is supported by an article by I.G. Richardson (‘Employment in the public and private sectors, 1978 to 1984’ in Economic Trends, no. 377, March 1985), according to which the full-time equivalent factor for part-time local authority manual workers was 0.41; the same equivalent for non-manual employees with further education was only 0.11, but for other non-manual employees it was 0.53— their average also works out at around 0.4. In other parts of the public sector part-timers have been taken as half-units; in the private sector, on the other hand, many part-timers work less than 40 per cent of the working week, as in the case of Saturday workers for instance.

Because of lack of information by service sectors, the 0.4 full- time equivalent has been applied throughout, although there may be possibly marked variations among sectors.

No adjustment has been made for male part-timers, in view of their much smaller numbers.

(1) The following branches have been considered—somewhat arbitrary—as tradeable services: hotels and catering, sea and air transport, transport supporting services, communications, banking and finance, insurance, business services and research and development.

(1) A. D. Smith and D. Hitchens, Productivity in the Distributive Trades, Cambridge University Press, 1985, chapter 7.