The services economy is pregnant with paradox. It employs our most-skilled and our least-skilled workers. The small productivity increase of service sector workers is regarded as one of the key problems facing us in a future in which four-fifths of the work-force will be employed in the service sector. At the same time, productivity-enhancing outputs from the service sector are the key to future world growth and development. While we can't get rich taking in each other's laundry, the failure to do so as the world economy becomes more 'roundabout' would doom us to stagnation.

Is the growth of the service sector a menace or a bounty? Will our society degenerate into two solitudes-the high-skilled rich and the low-skilled poor? How can an export-driven economy like Canada's survive the growth of the service sector? What should governments do to encourage or discourage service growth?

Service Industry Growth: Causes and Effects addresses these paradoxes and provides a summary of the most complete and far-reaching research project ever conducted on the economics of the service sector.