June 05, 2002 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Fast growth in services to business

The service-producing sector accounted for about 97 percent of the increase in employment recorded over the period 1988 to 2000. A single division of the sector, services (a diverse collection of industries from barber shops to hospitals and religious organizations to consultants), accounted for more than half the jobs added to the U.S. economy over that period.

[Chart data—TXT]

Inside the services division, the differences in rates of job growth from 1988 to 2000 among industries providing business–oriented, consumer-oriented, or a mix of both kinds of customer are striking. There was an increase of 49 percent among consumer services, but business-oriented services increased their head count by fully 88 percent. The number of jobs in “mixed” services rose a relatively modest 34 percent.

These data are products of the Current Employment Statistics program. Services were sorted into consumer-oriented, business-oriented, or mixed based on the input-output tables produced by the Employment Projections program. See Services: business demand rivals consumer demand in driving job growth, by Bill Goodman and Reid Steadman, Monthly Labor Review, April 2002.