The Contribution of Business Services to European Economic Growth

Abstract

This chapter analyses the contributions of business services to aggregate economic growth in Europe. The growth of business services represents a qualitatively new stage in the social structure of production. A major characteristic of this structural change is that firm-level scale economies with regard to knowledge and skill inputs are reduced by external deliveries of such inputs, thereby exploiting external scale economies. This combines with an increasingly complex social division of labour between economic sectors. The share of knowledge-intensive services in the intermediate inputs of the total economy has risen sharply over the past decade.