ABSTRACT
From a statistical point of view, the reason for the change in the relative shares of industry and service sector employment lies in two factors: the relative growth of productivity and the relative growth of total demand. Labour productivity indices relate output to labour inputs; global productivity indices relate output to the whole set of inputs such as labour, capital, energy, materials and other inputs. The difference between goods and services was emphasized by the classical economists who considered many service activities as "unproductive labour". The productivity measures which can be constructed on the notion of service output as an immaterial good are conceptually similar to the notion of productivity in manufacturing industry. The systems of national accounts of the market-type economies apply to the conceptual categories of services which have been developed to describe economic systems primarily based on the production of manufacturing goods.
