Who was Barbara Mitchell?

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This study examines the trends and outlooks for four different ground transportation industries in Canada: bus passenger service, railway service, trucking, and taxis. Ground transportation is less spectacular in its growth and outlook for the future than air transportation. Nevertheless, rail and truck freight revenues have consistently been more than 3 percent of Canada's GNP during the past decade, with value added in just these two industries somewhere between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of GNP. These nominally small percentages are actually quite large for two industries as narrowly defined as these two have been for this study.

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The retail and wholesale trade sector coordinates the complex task of transferring goods from countless domestic and foreign factories to the shelves of Canadian consumers. Besides distributing goods, retailers and wholesalers perform such economic functions as predicting the present and future demands of consumers for manufacturers, and selecting innovative product lines and product mixes for customers. Retail success requires products to be displayed and services provided in ways that reduce the search costs of consumers through less time and information intensive methods of shopping. An increasing amount of competition has been channeled into developing distinctive retail reputations for value and quality and this produces experimentation in the design of physical and organizational structures that provide increasingly reliable service in secure and pleasing environments.

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Consulting engineering services typically go unnoticed by the average consumer. Yet, the practitioners in this industry have a major role in the design, building and management of our physical environment. Engineers have a large, though largely unseen, impact on our everyday life. Once this is realized the following questions take on added importance for both members of the industry and the general public. What are the influences that affect the demand for engineering services? Why is the industry primarily comprised of pure consulting firms and what size is engineering in the national economy? Is Canada a major player in the international engineering and design industry? What role do the various levels of government have in this industry? Should governments do more -or less- for the industry? What are the industry's prospects for the future?

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The telecommunications industry in several important and dramatic ways does not fit the stereotype of a service industry. In particular, it is a relatively capital intensive industry that has enjoyed well-above average rates of productivity growth. Technological changes affecting the industry in recent years have been marked and have spawned new communications activities such as cellular radio. The employment growth generated in the industry has been associated with an increase in average educational levels, rather than a significant deskilling that numerous observers of the service sector worry about. The prospects are for continued performance along these lines. However, continued government restrictions on competition in the industry could thwart the realization of many of the benefits of productivity and technological change on both the supply and demand sides of the market.

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The rapid growth of the service sector of the Canadian economy has been widely documented. Many studies in this series of research projects investigate the experiences of particular service industries. This study is unique because it focuses on vertical disintegration or contracting out, a potentially important component of every service industry's growth. Vertical disintegration or contracting out refers to manufacturing and other firms' decisions to contract out services previously produced in-house to specialized suppliers in the service sector. The major hypothesis we will investigate is that since contracting out accounts for much of the service sector's growth, the existing data overstate the extent to which the Canadian economy is becoming more service-intensive.

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This book discusses how prices, income and demographic factors affect the demand for insurance. Productivity, innovation and scale and scope economies are analyzed with implications drawn for entry barriers and mergers affecting Canadian insurers. The effects of government tax policy and direct regulation of the industry are analyzed and evaluated, along with the role of insurance firms as financial intermediaries.

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As research on the labour market behaviour underlying the Canadian service economy progressed, it became apparent that a conceptual understanding of the rise, transformation, and expected further development of the service economy was necessary to understand employment and labour adjustment issues. Chapter 2 provides such a conceptual mapping based on recent theoretical and empirical work in this field. In chapter 3, using a multitude of published and unpublished time series and cross-sectional data, the evolution of employment in Canadian service industries is analysed, thereby indirectly testing some of the competing hypotheses discussed in chapter 2. Chapter 4 provides a further analysis of employment changes in the service economy by examining the changing nature of service sector jobs in terms of changing technologies, occupations and skills. How technological and other changes have intermediated this process of employment adjustment historically will also be investigated. Chapter 5 takes a closer look at the structure, function and performance of labour markets in the Canadian service economy. Using two case studies developed by the author, chapter 6 illustrates common labour adjustment and industrial relations problems in the service sector. These case studies examine two business organizations operating in medium and high technology fields. Finally, chapter 7 provides an outlook on expected future manpower issues.

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