A New Service Typology: Geographical Diversity and Dynamics of the German Service Economy

The heterogeneity of activities within the service economy still seems to be little understood. Service typologies are affluent yet incomplete and often partial in their focus. As a consequence, interregional comparisons and the development of evidence-based regional policies are rather difficult. In this chapter we improve an integrative typology of the service economy first developed in the Service Industries Journal (Glückler and Hammer, Service Industries Journal 31(6):941–957, 2011) in order to obtain a more concise and valid classification of service types that capture different sectoral and spatial dynamics of service employment relevant for regional policy. Concretely, the chapters pursues three objectives. First, it develops a classification of service sectors based on the criteria of market orientation, knowledge-intensity and technology-intensity. Second, it matches this integrative typology with three-digit NACE-codes of service sectors. Third, the empirical analysis demonstrates how this typology conveys significant differences in the spatial and sectoral dynamics of the service economy in Germany. Based on employment figures for the period 1999–2005, the analysis succeeds in separating employment decline from growth, geographical agglomeration from decentralization and regional expansion from local clustering in the service economy.