sERVICE ECONOMY
Jessica Ríos mendoza
14
Service Industries have rapidly grown to be recognized in core and semi-periphery countries. The service industry is also known as tertiary economic activity, and tertiary is subdivided into quaternary and quinary economic activities. They’re all service, however tertiary connects producers to consumers, quaternary is concerned with information or the exchange of money or goods, and quinary is tied to research or higher education. An example of a big service industry is Wal-Mart. This enormous retail store is known throughout much of the world, and has its core in Bentonville. The huge headquarters make office to human resources as well as all the work that has to do with the administration of goods and people. Many other industries have moved their headquarters to Fayetteville so they can do business with Wal-Mart, one being Procter&Gamble (P&G). They decided to cleverly place their offices 25 miles from the Wal-Mart home to administrate their agreements and make new ones easily. Of course, they are not the only company who decided to move close to their main ally, and thus many other service economies can be found in similar situations. “High Technology Clusters” are one of these service economies. These industries concentrate in technological infrastructure and lower taxes, are organized in corridors, and do not care for near location of raw materials or particular markets; what they mostly care about is the proximity to the major networks of transportation and communication. These industries often have technopoles as well, which are “areas planned for high technology where agglomeration built on a synergy among technological companies occur.”
Another thriving service economy is tourism; it grew dramatically during the second half of the twentieth century. It has transformed downtowns, ports, hinterlands, parks, and waterfronts. Its economic impacts are incredible; “the monetary value of godos and services associated with tourism is now conservatively estimated at more than $2 trillion – and if spillover effects are taken into consideration, the figure could be twice as large.” However, both of these service economies, including many more, have vulnerabilities and their “kryptonite”. For example, tourism deals great falls whenever a natural hazard occurs; jobs in the travel-planning industries are lost because of the Internet and machines that can do the same job. These hazards don’t make the service economy any less significant, though; “the very geographical structure of large-scale service economies can affect the fortunes of places, regions, countries, and even the globe. Places dominated by the service sector cannot exist without extensive connections with other places because those living in such places still need food and material products, and they often need a large market to sustain their services.”