New Evidence On The Expansion Of Service Employment In Advanced Economies

In this article the expansion of service sector employment is examined in detail in seven OECD countries, i.e. France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States, using a newly developed set of estimates for service employment. A sufficient degree of disaggregation, consistency and harmonization was attained by merging existing national sources on employment. The twenty two distinguished service activities are aggregated into four subsectors i.e. producer, distributive, personal and social services. The new evidence revealed that the characteristics of the expansion of services claimed by a number of studies needs adjustment, and for some services the figures of recent years indicate serious changes in trends. In the sixties the growing service employment share was largely due to the expansion of social services. In the seventies and eighties growth in social services slowed down and the expansion of producer services became more prominant. Further, employment growth in personal services started to accelerate in the seventies after substantial declines in the sixties. These changing trends were most pronounced in the United States, but other countries seem to be following the same pattern with some lag.