Service Industry

The Growing Service Sector

Discussion Topic: The decline of the manufacturing sector in the U.S. has been compensated by a growing service sector.

The shift in the U.S. economy away from goods-producing in favor of service-providing is expected to continue. Service-providing industries are anticipated to generate approximately 14.5 million new wage and salary jobs. As with goods-producing industries, growth among service-providing industries will vary.

Since 1980 there has been a downward trend in manufacturing

Employment, while employment in service-producing industries continued to grow at an even faster pace.

In the U.S. economy, jobs can be categorized into sectors, which can then be split into divisions, each of which include various industries. There are two major sectors in the U.S. economy, as identified by the U.S. Standard Industry Classification System: the goods-producing sector and the service-producing sector. The goods-producing sector includes agriculture, forestry, and fishing; mining; construction; and manufacturing. The service-producing sector includes the divisions of (1) transportation, communications, and utilities; (2)wholesale trade; (3) retail trade; (4) finance, insurance, and real estate; (5) public administration; and (6) services. This sixth group—the services division—includes a number of industries

Several commenters have responded to my recent story (and blogposts) about the decline of U.S. manufacturing by insisting it's no big deal if the manufacturing sector shrinks. The United States will gradually replace current manufacturing-sector work with higher-value-added manufacturing and service-sector work, the argument goes, just as we replaced agriculture with manufacturing during the last century. (About 40 percent of the labor force toiled in agriculture in 1900; that was down to about 2 percent in 2000.) These critics are confident we either won't miss a beat or will get a lot richer in the process.

I think...