Services in the EU Productive Systems: a Comparative Study of the New and Old Member States

Abstract

The continuous tertiarisation process of developed economies can be appreciated not only by means of growth of the share of services within the value added and employment, but also through the more intensive use of services inputs by all the activities forming part of productive system. The essential importance of services, and especially of some of their activities, consists of positive impact they produce on user activities. In this work the tertiarisation of productive systems of several European Union (EU) new and old member states, employing the input-output tables, is analyzed. To be precise, the tertiarisation effects obtained using technical coefficients and Leontief inverse matrix coefficients are thoroughly examined. Our attention is focused only on the direct and total effects. Direct effects comprise the immediate intermediate demand of each productive sector necessary to produce an additional unit of its product. On the other hand, total effects measure all the direct and indirect inputs needed to produce an additional unit of output. The main characteristics of the selected countries refers to their reduced size that can be compared to the NUTS 2 regions. The EU, establishing its regional policy, which main goal consists in the achievement of a higher level of the economic, social and territorial cohesion, takes into account regions precisely of this level. So, this analysis enables not only to compare the state of tertiarisation in the new and old European member countries, but also to approach this analysis to the territory level similar to NUTS 2 regions. The study carried out in this work, enables us, on the one hand, to appreciate the differences existing between countries from the point of view of the share of the tertiary sector in total gross value added (GVA) and from the point of view of the use of services by whole of the productive systems. On the other hand, the activities that introduce tertiary inputs into their productive processes with greater intensity are indentified. Furthermore an attempt to check if there is any relation between the activities’ tertiarisation degree and their importance for national productive systems is made. The results of this work may be of great interest from the point of view of the new member states as they highlight the current situation concerning the services sector which development is essential for the achievement of Europe 2020 strategy objectives. Namely, enhancing the services performance, these countries could improve their situation concerning employment, their relation with innovation and general economic background.