The Substitution Of Self‐Service Activities For Marketed Services

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part the consequences of permanent differences in the rates of productivity growth between economic activities are dealt with. Special attention is given to the substitution of self‐service activities for marketed services. The former are tentatively defined as activities carried out outside the market having the following principal inputs: consumer's time, industrial products (mainly durables), and energy. The emergence of self‐service activities challenges the conventional division of man's time into work for market and leisure, which should be replaced by a more detailed breakdown. Consumers’preference for self‐service results mainly from high taxation, high real wages and equality in the distribution of personal income. Because of the growth of self‐service activities in industrialized countries a non‐negligible part of the population's productive effort will be difficult to record, since it will neither appear on the market nor have market value. The need to record self‐service activities would be most strongly felt in statistics on private consumption, but would also have consequences in the measurement of the nation's welfare. One should make a distinction between consumption of marketed services and their self‐service substitutes in order to provide information on the complementarity of the energy, time and material inputs into various self‐service activities and on the substitutability between them and marketed services. This could perhaps be done with the help of extended commodity‐private expenditure matrices. The recording as well as the valuation of non‐market working time would probably cause great difficulties. Self‐service activities are also becoming sufficiently important to warrant their inclusion in the debate on the measurement of the nation's productive effort and of the nation's welfare. But any recording of self‐service activities would be a controversial measure since it would require recourse to imputations on a large scale.