Productivity growth and cyclical behaviour in service industries: the Spanish case

Andrés Maroto-Sánchez

The Service Industries Journal, 2009, vol. 31, issue 5, 725-745

Abstract: A longstanding basis of empirical economics is that average labour productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms, and thus behaves procyclically. In the short run, in many countries output growth and productivity tend to move together and across a wide range of industries. In recent years, this observation has gained increased prominence as each proposed explanation for the observed procyclicality has important implications for modelling the business cycle and measuring the technical change. By filtering out the influence of business cycles, it is possible to isolate changes in the long run, or structural rate, of productivity growth and so assess the importance of any source for economic growth. Nevertheless, the focus of these empirical works has been the aggregate economy or manufacturing industries, and not the services sector. The novelty of this paper is the focus on the patterns within the services sector. The aim of this paper is to better understand short-run changes in productivity growth within the service sector industries, which are necessarily different from those existing within the manufacturing sector. Another goal of this research is to assess whether this observed procyclicality remains if the service sector is the scope of analysis, and whether this is homogeneous among the different activities within this miscellaneous sector or not. Empirical evidence for the Spanish economy since 1980 is presented.

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1080/02642060902838311

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The Service Industries Journal is currently edited by Eileen Bridges, Professor Domingo Ribeiro, Ronald Goldsmith, Barry Howcroft and Youjae Yi

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