How to Make the Service Economy Really Deliver
Services can hold back productivity growth in the economy as a whole. The answer is more competition.
Making services better.
Photographer: Simon DawsonThis article is for subscribers only.
When we think about productivity, we often have a bias towards physical goods -- things we can touch and feel, like iPhones or suits. But over the past century, as the economic historian Stephen Broadberry has shown, services, not manufacturing, have been key to explaining which countries are moving up or down the international productivity league table. And yet advanced economies are moving away from the one productivity booster in this area that has been proven to work.