The effect of services needs to be updated in economic activity data to avoid bad decisions

Summary: The idea that manufacturing is superior to services for powering a country’s economy has long been taken as a given. That’s why some economists have issued warnings about developing countries experiencing what they call premature deindustrialization. In those countries, they see service activity overtaking manufacturing before a proper manufacturing economy has taken hold. But what if the way services are measured no longer reflects modern production? And what if services don’t deserve to be relegated to a lesser form of production anyway? Read the transcript https://bit.ly/2KeCFYz Read the working paper https://bit.ly/2OrCE8R About the authors Valerie Mercer-Blackman is a senior economist at the Asian Development Bank. Christine Ablaza is a doctoral student at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Know more about ADBI’s work https://bit.ly/2YuWWhH https://bit.ly/2YufPRH