Introduction

Abstract

The European economy is in a process of structural change. Two major trends have characterized the period of the past two decades. One is that the share of manufacturing in the overall economy is shrinking. The other trend is that services, and particularly business services, account for a monotonically increasing share of the European economy. Both structural shifts are linked to each other in several ways. The fabric of inter-industry relations is being woven in a new way as a result of the growing specialization in knowledge services, the exploitation of scale economies for human capital, lowered costs of outsourcing in-house services, and the growing tertiarization of all production processes, including that of the manufacturing industry. The business-services industry plays a key role in many of these processes. Many links between the development of the business-services industry, and its role in economic growth, remain under-explored in the literature. With this book we hope to fill some of the gaps in the knowledge.