Growth and Change in the Service Sector of the U.S.: A Spatial Perspective

Abstract

Although there is growing recognition that services play a major role in developed economies, knowledpe concerning the service sector, including its spatial characteristics. is quite limited. This study examines the spatial structure of the U.S. service sector and change in that structure from 1958 to 1977. It is based on an analysis of service employment and employment change for a sample of U . S . SMSAs and nonmetropolitan areas. Most of the change in service structure that took place during the study period was focused in business and professional services and in finance, insurance, and real estate. Many individual industries in these groupings exhibited both downfiltering from larger to smaller places and very strong growth in the South. As a result, the South reversed its relative deficiency in many specialized services. A relationship between total employment growth and both the concentration in and relative growth of business, professional, and financial services was observed. Study results suggest that regional development policies that foster service growth could benefit not only large SMSAs but many smaller places as well.

Urban Hierarchy or Local Buzz? High-Order Producer Service and (or) Knowledge-Intensive Business Service Location in Canada, 1991-2001

“…The explanation for this, from a macrogeographic perspective, is that tertiarization occurs first in and around metropolitan areas; smaller and more remote cities then catch up (Kirn [1987] speaks of the "downfiltering" of KIBS). Given the arguments referred to in the previous section, a key question is whether the downfiltering process has now been supplanted by a technology-driven metropolization process, as even lower order services can now access their clients over distance.…”

“…Notwithstanding these processes recently evoked in the light of improving communications technologies, results covering the 1970s and 1980s have shown that KIBS, although very concentrated at the top of the urban hierarchy, have been growing faster in smaller and more remote cities (Kirn 1987;Ó hUallacháin and Reid 1991;Coffey and Shearmur 1997). The explanation for this, from a macrogeographic perspective, is that tertiarization occurs first in and around metropolitan areas; smaller and more remote cities then catch up (Kirn [1987] speaks of the "downfiltering" of KIBS).…”

Sustainable Urban External Service Function Development for Building the International Megalopolis in the Pearl River Delta, China

“…The link between the evolution of regional economy and the patterns of geographical competition and cooperation has been examined in previous study [21][22][23][24][25].…”

Employment and location patterns of advanced services in non-urban Canada

“…Little is therefore known about how advanced service activity in rural areas differs from that in urban and metropolitan areas. Exceptions with at least some rural, or non-metropolitan orientation include Kirn [1987]; Coffey and Polèse [1989]; Coffey [1993];O'Farrell, Moffatt and Hitchens [1993]; Glasmeier and Howland [1994]; Beyers [1996]; Beyers and Lindahl [1996]; Eberts and Randall [1998]; Gatrell [1999]; Polèse and Shearmur [2002]; and a series of papers and monographs published by the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation (CRRF) and the Canadian Institute for Research on Regional Development (CIRRD) since the early 1990s. 5 Curiously, in a recent survey of the European literature, Illeris [2004] concludes that during the 1990s less priority than in the past has been accorded research on the role of services in regional development.…”