Opinion Leader | Sheng Song Cheng Longyu
The development of service industry can provide strong support for cultivating new quality productivity
Develop new quality productivity, create new value and adapt New industry Remodeling new momentum is the internal requirement and important focus for promoting high-quality development. The development of the service industry (especially the productive service industry) can provide strong support for the cultivation of new quality productivity, because promoting the development of new quality productivity not only needs to improve the scientific and technological innovation ability, but also needs to provide better market foundation, more efficient factor allocation and more comprehensive talent support for the transformation of scientific research achievements. The high-quality development of the service industry itself will also become part of the new quality productivity.
We should avoid a misunderstanding when dealing with the development of the service industry, which is to oppose the increase of the proportion of the service industry to the development of the manufacturing industry. In fact, without advanced and high-quality service industry, it is difficult to have advanced manufacturing industry. The high-end parts of the manufacturing industry, such as research and development, design, patents, brands, etc., belong to the category of producer services. With the deepening of economic digitalization, more and more parts of the service industry directly support the development of advanced manufacturing, and the boundary between the service industry and manufacturing industry is increasingly blurred. Many parts of the value of services are included in the price of manufactured goods. Therefore, the development of service industry and manufacturing industry is not contradictory. More important than statistical data is their development connotation.
From the differences in the structure of the service industry between China and the United States, we can see that the development of producer services is an important driving force to increase the proportion of services in GDP, and it is also the main performance of improving the competitiveness of the service industry; The difference in the proportion of producer services in GDP between China and the United States is greater than that of life services, and the gap mainly comes from the high-end part of producer services. These findings are expected to provide direction for the service industry to help the development of new quality productivity.
The structural difference between China and the United States in service industry mainly lies in producer services
In 2023, the added value of China's service industry (tertiary industry) will account for 54.6% of GDP. As early as the 1940s, the tertiary industry accounted for nearly 60% of the GDP in the United States. At present, the tertiary industry accounts for 81.6% of the GDP in the United States. In addition to the difference in the total amount, the difference in the structure of the service industry between China and the United States deserves more attention. Nearly 60% of the 30 percentage points gap between China and the United States in the proportion of the service sector comes from producer services.
According to the conceptual standards of the National Bureau of Statistics, producer services can be understood as an intermediate service sector, mainly providing services for the production activities of various market entities; The services provided by the life service industry are mainly used for the final consumption of residents. At present, producer services involve 16 sectors of the national economy, mainly including wholesale, transportation, warehousing and postal services, information transmission, software and information technology services, finance, leasing and business services, scientific research and technology services, ecological environmental protection and environmental governance. The life service industry involves 13 industries, mainly including retail, accommodation and catering, real estate, tourism, resident services, repair and other services, education, health and social work, culture, sports and entertainment. According to the latest available data, we mapped the industry categories of the U.S. service industry to the above industry categories, and obtained that the producer services in China and the United States accounted for 31.4% of their respective GDP respectively [Due to the limitation of data availability, the data of China's tertiary industry segments is 2021. In addition, China's wholesale and retail are combined to calculate the proportion of China's producer services, Estimate the proportion of wholesale trade in GDP by 50% of wholesale and retail trade] and 47.7% [Corresponding to the United States, producer services include the following services provided by private individuals: transportation and warehousing, information industry, professional and business services (including scientific research, law, company and enterprise management, administrative and support services, etc.) , leasing services and intangible assets leasing, finance and insurance, wholesale trade, and government services. Due to the difference in statistical caliber between China and the United States, China did not list government services separately. The United States first distinguished private services and government services, and then further subdivided them into different industries in the field of private services, while the field of government services was not classified into different industries. Therefore, China's producer services industry statistics include both private services and government services. In order to increase comparability, and the government service itself is a public service, the US government service is included in the calculation of producer services]. The proportion of producer services in China's GDP is 16.3 percentage points lower than that of the United States.
The difference in the proportion of living services between China and the United States mainly comes from the fields of health care and real estate, which can explain more than 80% of the difference in the proportion of living services between China and the United States. In addition, the difference in the proportion of most living services between China and the United States in GDP is not obvious. With the increase of income and the increase of life expectancy of residents, it is expected that China's medical, health and pension fields will usher in extensive development. However, the difference in the proportion of added value of the real estate industry between China and the United States is not as big as the statistics show. Due to various reasons, the contribution of China's real estate to the economy is underestimated. If we estimate according to the broad caliber (the part of the added value related to real estate in the construction industry and the added value of the real estate industry are combined, and the comparability in different national statistical caliber is achieved), the contribution of China's real estate industry to the economy is equivalent to that of the United States and Japan. This further indicates that the structural differences between China and the United States in the service sector are more reflected in the differences in producer services. It is worth mentioning that it is difficult to completely distinguish between producer services and life services, because some industries belong to both producer services and life services. For example, industries with the nature of public services (meteorological, seismic, marine, surveying and mapping and other professional and technical services, education, health and social work, etc.), and some industries have the characteristics of providing services for production and life at the same time (transportation, mobile telecommunications services, vocational education and training services, etc.). According to the classification standard of the National Bureau of Statistics, there are 76 industry subcategories with the characteristics of both productive and life services, while China's productive services industry involves 348 industry subcategories, and life services industry includes 288 industry subcategories. The above cross fields only account for 11.9% of all industry subcategories, which does not affect our observation of the overall structural characteristics of the service industry in China and the United States.
The development of producer services may simultaneously increase the share of services in the economy and labor productivity
Generally speaking, the labor productivity of the service industry is lower than that of the manufacturing industry. However, while the proportion of service industry in the United States increased, it also maintained a high labor productivity. At present, the per capita GDP of the United States has exceeded 80000 dollars, and 84% of the employed population in the United States is engaged in the tertiary industry. The data of other developed countries also show that the higher the income of a country, the higher the labor productivity of the service industry, and the closer the labor productivity of its service industry is to that of the secondary industry. Through a longitudinal analysis of the process of increasing the proportion of the U.S. service industry in the economy, we find that the development of producer services is one of the main driving forces to increase the proportion of services in the U.S. GDP.
In the decades since 1947, the proportion of producer services in the GDP of the United States has been on the rise as a whole, especially in the high-end sectors (such as information industry, professional and business services, financial industry, etc.), and the proportion of individual industries (such as transportation and warehousing) has declined; In the life service industry, except for the significant increase in the proportion of the added value of health care and the real estate industry (the real estate industry has actually absorbed a part of the achievements of the development of productive services thanks to the increase in land value brought by economic development), other life service industries have experienced relatively gentle changes, even a small decline.
On the whole, the development of producer services has contributed more to the increase in the proportion of American services. After the basic living needs of residents have been fully met, the increase space of the added value of the living service industry tends to be limited. However, producer services, especially scientific research and professional technology, can provide higher added value. In the era of accelerated development of information technology and digital economy, the latter may even grow exponentially. For a long time, the proportion of producer services in the United States has increased synchronously with the per capita GDP. The proportion of producer services in the GDP of the United States increased from 39.5% in 1977 to 47.7% in 2023 [the calculation caliber is consistent with the above, and some industry sub category data were not disclosed before 1977], and its per capita GDP (calculated at constant prices) increased from $30337 to $66755 in the same period.
China should pay more attention to the high-quality development of producer services
In recent years, China's producer services have accelerated their development. From 2010 to 2021, the proportion of China's tertiary industry in GDP will increase from 44.3% to 53.5%. Among them, the proportion of information transmission, computer services and software industries increased the most, and their proportion in GDP increased by 1.79 percentage points; The proportion of leasing and business services, finance, scientific research and technology services in GDP increased by 1.37, 1.56 and 0.83 percentage points respectively. The above industries have contributed more than 60% to the increase of the proportion of the three industries in China.
Data source: National Bureau of Statistics of China, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, calculated and sorted by the author Nevertheless, the gap between China's producer services and the United States is still significant, especially in the high value-added industries. Specifically, China's information services and software industry accounted for 3.9% of GDP, 3.3 percentage points lower than that of the United States; China's scientific research and technical services account for 2.5% of GDP, while the United States accounts for 5%; The leasing and commercial service industry in China is 3.8 percentage points lower than the similar fields in the United States (leasing services and intangible asset leasing, legal services, corporate and enterprise management services, administrative and support services). Taken together, the above three industries show that China is 9.6 percentage points lower than the United States, which explains the 58.9% difference in the proportion of producer services between China and the United States.
The competitiveness of China's producer services also has a large room for improvement. Take the financial industry as an example. In 2023, the added value of China's financial industry will account for 8.0% of GDP, even higher than that of the United States (7.3%), but "large but not strong". From the perspective of service trade, in 2023, China's trade surplus in financial services was only $647 million, while the U.S. trade surplus in financial services was $113.6 billion, which is the primary source of the U.S. trade surplus in services. This shows that the competitiveness of China's financial industry still has much room for improvement. The 2023 Central Financial Work Conference put forward requirements for improving the quality and efficiency of financial services for the real economy. The financial industry still has much to offer in supporting technological innovation, industrial upgrading and green transformation.
Many of China's service trade deficits also originate from productive services. In contrast, the United States has advantages in productive services such as finance, intellectual property royalties, and other commercial services, with surpluses of US $113.6 billion, US $82 billion, and US $108.42 billion, respectively. At present, China's deficit under intellectual property royalties is 31.75 billion US dollars; The trade surplus in other commercial services was US $38.03 billion, still a large gap with the United States. Therefore, although the United States has a huge deficit in trade in goods, we should also see that the growth of American trade in services has greatly promoted its balance of international payments. In 2023, the U.S. service trade surplus will be nearly 280 billion dollars, while China's deficit will exceed 220 billion dollars.
Service trade, digital trade and other fields are new growth points of international trade in recent years. The high-quality development of producer services will help China actively connect with high-level economic and trade rules, which is of great significance to improve China's competitiveness in the field of new trade formats. The World Trade Report issued by the World Trade Organization (WTO) predicts that by 2040, global trade in services will account for 50% of global trade. At present, the global service trade accounts for 30% of the total trade volume, and China accounts for 12%. In service trade, the proportion of digital trade [defined by the World Trade Organization as digitally ordered or digitally delivered trade] is rising, and there is also broad space for development. At present, high-income countries account for 82.6% of the service trade of digital delivery. China is one of the countries with the largest production data in the world, and the potential to be tapped and released is huge. According to the statistics of International Data Corporation (IDC), more than 1.4 billion people in China create more than 20% of the world's data.
The essence of high-quality development of the service industry is more important than the form
Simple and one-sided data limited to the proportion of service industry or manufacturing industry in GDP is of little significance, and more attention should be paid to the connotation of high-quality economic development. The high-quality development of service industry and manufacturing industry are closely linked. It can even be said that without advanced and high-quality service industry, it is difficult to have advanced manufacturing industry. This year's Government Work Report, when talking about the implementation of "vigorously promoting the construction of modern industrial system and accelerating the development of new quality productivity", also specifically talked about "accelerating the development of modern producer services".
In 2023, the export scale of China's high-tech products will account for 25.1% of the total export volume of goods. Among them, the export volume of information and communication products was $498.52 billion, achieving a surplus of $335.87 billion. However, it should also be objectively recognized that the export amount of these products also includes the capacity of foreign-funded enterprises in China. Chinese companies still have to work hard to obtain more added value from the sales of these products, especially the intellectual property rights, brands and other parts of the high value-added service industry.
In recent years, the trend of "nearshore reflow" in the global production layout is largely based on the improvement of technological innovation, which has improved the production response ability of enterprises to the demand for customized products. To cope with similar challenges, Chinese enterprises need to have stronger internationalization and innovation capabilities. Driven by multiple factors such as rising labor costs, changes in the international environment, and the restructuring of the global value chain, Chinese enterprises have taken a new round of "going to sea", and they need more productive services to "escort" them. In this process, enterprises not only need to move towards the high-end of the global value chain through technological innovation, product innovation and brand building, but also need the support of professional services such as business services, finance and law. The transformation of China from a manufacturing country to an innovation country is a systematic project that needs coordination and cooperation of all industries and fields.
In a word, the service industry plays an indispensable role in the cultivation and development of new quality productivity, especially the productive service industry with high added value, which is an important direction for China's service industry to support high-quality economic development in the future. With the increasing importance of data elements and the acceleration of information technology development, energy transformation and other major changes, China's super large market is expected to play more advantages, provide rich application scenarios for new technologies and new products, and create a better economic and social environment for continuous innovation.
Source: Wenhui
(The author of this article introduces: the former counselor of the People's Bank of China, the former director of the Investigation and Statistics Department of the People's Bank of China.)
