IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/kof/wpskof/06-155.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Productivity Growth in Service Industries - Has "Baumol's Disease" Really Been Cured?

Author

Listed:
  • Jochen Hartwig

Abstract

Since the mid-nineties, U.S. labor productivity outgrows its European counterpart by a wide margin. Several recent studies have found that this result is brought about by relatively few service industries, where productivity growth has accelerated in the U.S., but not so in Europe. Based on this finding, TRIPLETT/BOSWORTH (2003) have asserted that 'Baumol's Disease', according to which imbalances in productivity growth between a 'progressive' (manufacturing) and a 'nonprogressive' (service) sector of the economy lead to constant expenditure shifts into the latter, 'has been cured' - at least in the U.S. The present paper challenges this statement, showing that there is only one genuine service industry with a lasting increase in productivity, namely wholesale and retail trade. Labor productivity in the U.S. retail industry has grown fast due to a recent proliferation of Wal-Mart-type 'big box' stores that would be practically impossible in Europe because of stricter zoning plans. Since this 'Wal-Mart effect' is likely to taper off sooner or later, it is more accurate to say that 'Baumol's Disease' has been protracted than to say that it has been cured.

Suggested Citation

  • Jochen Hartwig, 2006. "Productivity Growth in Service Industries - Has "Baumol's Disease" Really Been Cured?," KOF Working papers 06-155, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
    • Handle: RePEc:kof:wpskof:06-155
    DOI: 10.3929/ethz-a-005277187
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-005277187
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.3929/ethz-a-005277187?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jianghuai Zheng & Lili Zhang & Yu Wang, 2011. "The Underdevelopment of Service Industry in China: An Empirical Study of Cities in Yangtze River Delta," Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities, Higher Education Press, vol. 6(3), pages 413-446, September.
    2. Jochen Hartwig, 2008. "Has Health Capital Formation Cured 'Baumol's Disease'? - Panel Granger Causality Evidence for OECD Countries," KOF Working papers 08-206, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
    3. P.W. Daniels, 2011. "Service industries at a crossroads: some fragile assumptions and future challenges," The Service Industries Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(4), pages 619-639, June.
    4. Zheng, Jianghuai & Zhang, Lili & Wang, Yu, 2010. "The underdevelopment of service industry in China: an empirical study of cities in Yangtze River Delta," MPRA Paper 33125, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Jun 2011.
    5. Jochen Hartwig, 2014. "Testing Okun’s law with Swiss industry data," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(29), pages 3581-3590, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Productivity; Services sector; Baumol's Disease; Statistical artifacts;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kof:wpskof:06-155. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/koethch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.