From overseas experience, the service industry is the most important direction for economic transformation. However, with the deepening of economic growth and social division of labor, the division of labor in the service industry has gradually refined. We can roughly divide the service industry into three categories: the first category is to meet the needs of enterprises, which can be called productive service industry, the second category is lifestyle service industry, which mainly meets the needs of residents, and the third category is public service industry provided by the government. The productive service industry can be defined as the intermediary of the industry, which runs through the entire industrial chain of industrial enterprises. It is accompanied by upstream information service industries such as market research, venture capital product design, professional commercial service industries such as quality control, accounting, legal insurance, and human resources, and downstream industries such as advertising, logistics, and sales.
After the 1970s, the service industry in the United States continued to grow rapidly: firstly, its average growth rate was much higher than that of the manufacturing industry; Secondly, it has hardly experienced a recession in decades, with the only negative growth occurring during the 2008 financial crisis, when the US service industry surpassed pre crisis levels in 2010. At present, the private service industry in the United States ranges from large to small, including seven categories: finance, real estate, professional commerce, wholesale, retail, medical education, information services, entertainment, culture, transportation, and warehousing. The proportion of financial, real estate, professional, commercial, educational, and medical services in GDP continues to rise, while only the proportion of wholesale and retail industries continues to decline.
In the first decade of economic transformation, the five major service industries represented by professional business education, healthcare, finance, real estate, culture, entertainment, and information services have experienced the fastest growth. Based on the average growth rate of 10 years from 1977 to 1987, professional business has the fastest growth rate, and in terms of details, industries such as computer management information systems, enterprise management consulting, and legal consulting have developed relatively faster. The education and medical industry has also experienced an average annual growth rate of nearly 12% over the past decade, second only to professional business, with the medical and relief industries experiencing faster growth rates. We also noticed that although the overall growth rate of the financial real estate service industry ranks third, the development of funds and trusts is the fastest among all service industries. Its average growth rate from 1977 to 1987 was as high as 32%, far exceeding the nominal GDP growth rate of 8.8% in the same period. Even in the 30 years from 1977 to 2009, its average growth rate reached an astonishing 17%, far exceeding the nominal GDP growth rate of 6% in the same period. In addition, the development of the securities industry is relatively fast. The growth rate of the information service industry and the entertainment and cultural industry is comparable, with an average annual growth rate of around 10%.
The situation in China: In the years after the economic slowdown in 1995, the growth rate of the service industry continued to exceed that of the secondary industry. This also means that if the potential growth rate of the Chinese economy declines in the future, then from historical experience, the service industry may be relatively better. At present, the latest data on the structure of China's service industry has only been updated until 2007. We can compare it with the service industry structure of the United States in 2010, and it is not difficult to find that the gap between the health, welfare, culture, and entertainment industries of the two countries is the largest, with the United States accounting for more than five times the proportion of China. The professional business service industry is four times that of China. Although the real estate industry in the United States has reached 2.7 times that of China, it includes estimated rent for self owned housing, thus exaggerating the gap. In addition, the proportion of information software, finance, wholesale, retail, accommodation, and catering industries in the United States is more than twice that of China. Therefore, there is huge room for growth in China's corresponding service industries.
In addition to the transformation towards services, another direction of China's economic transformation is towards high-end transformation. Currently, many sub industries are in a large-scale period of import substitution development. Therefore, the changes in the import and export of various industries reflect the upgrading of China's industries from labor-intensive to capital intensive and then to technology intensive.
