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The service provider must deliver the service at the exact time of service consumption. The service is not manifested in a physical object that is independent of the provider. The service consumer is also inseparable from service delivery. Examples: The service consumer must sit in the hairdresser's chair, or in the airplane seat.
Services constitute over 50% of GDP in low income countries and as their economies continue to develop, the importance of services in the economy continues to grow. [2] The service economy is also key to growth, for instance it accounted for 47% of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 2000–2005 (industry contributed 37% and agriculture 16% in the same period). [2]
For example, a restaurant provides a physical good (prepared food), but also provides services in the form of ambience, the setting and clearing of the table, etc. Although some utilities, such as electricity and communications service providers , exclusively provide services, other utilities deliver physical goods, such as water utilities .
In a 1938 article, Abram Bergson introduced the term social welfare function, with the intention "to state in precise form the value judgments required for the derivation of the conditions of maximum economic welfare." The function was real-valued and differentiable. It was specified to describe the society as a whole.
In examining the growth of the service sector in the early nineties, the globalist Kenichi Ohmae noted that: In the United States, 70 per cent of the workforce works in the service sector; in Japan, 60 per cent, and in Taiwan, 50 per cent. These are not necessarily busboys and live-in maids. Numerous of them are in the skilled category.
Welfare economics is a field of economics that applies microeconomic techniques to evaluate the overall well-being (welfare) of a society. [ 1 ] The principles of welfare economics are often used to inform public economics , which focuses on the ways in which government intervention can improve social welfare .
Under the standard assumption of neoclassical economics that goods and services are continuously divisible, the marginal rates of substitution will be the same regardless of the direction of exchange, and will correspond to the slope of an indifference curve (more precisely, to the slope multiplied by −1) passing through the consumption bundle in question, at that point: mathematically, it ...
The earlier term for the discipline was "political economy", but since the late 19th century, it has commonly been called "economics". [22] The term is ultimately derived from Ancient Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomia) which is a term for the "way (nomos) to run a household (oikos)", or in other words the know-how of an οἰκονομικός (oikonomikos), or "household or homestead manager".