ABSTRACT
During the past decades the study of the service sector has progressed considerably. Two main issues have been developed: the first concerns the growing interdependence between the secondary and tertiary sectors; the second relates to the role of the service sector in promoting economic development, mainly in metropolitan areas. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the increasing overlap between the service and production sectors, to propose a new conceptual framework for analysing the structure of economic activity and to review a series of empirical studies carried out in Canada, Denmark, France and Switzerland (and including their metropolitan regions) using this framework.
