Premature deindustrialization, inter-sectoral employment shifts, and accelerated servicization

Concern about the implications of ‘premature deindustrialization’ for economic growth of developing countries has evolved into investigation over whether parts of the service sector can play a propulsive role similar to that played by manufacturing previously. Such investigation is hampered by coarse and changing service sector classifications, but it does appear that some service sectors play such a role. In this paper we take the incremental but important step of identifying whether employment growth in certain service sectors corresponds with employment loss in manufacturing through ‘premature deindustrialization’, deploying the counter-concept of ‘accelerated servicization’. Investigating employment growth in key service sectors which are more finely classified than those used in the previous studies, we find that: (1) of five broadly classified service sectors, only that encompassing ‘FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) and business services’ demonstrates accelerated servicization, and (2) this is attributable to the component sectors of ‘information services’ and ‘business support’, but not FIRE. In fact FIRE exhibits a distinctive pattern, warranting the label ‘quasi service’.