サービス概念と産業分析の基本問題

抄録

One of main difficulties to analyze a service economy is that we still have not a clear concept of services In the orthodox economics, services have been treated in the same way as goods, because they just creat only utilities. This tradition has led to superficial researches in the service economy
The term of goods in this paper is used to signify tangible or intangible objects owned by human beings The term of services is defined as useful functioning or events caused by the goods Both of the definitions are basically in line with the I Fisher's definitions The service contains time and space as essential elements And also, there does not exist any significant service unless the subject (=goods) emanating services has the object (=goods) receiving them Such attributes of service as (1) specificity of time and space, and (2) non-existency in itself, bring about various unique characteristics in transaction of service ex impossibility of service transactions in the case of non-durables, non-storability, non-transportability, irreversibility, externality, uncertainty, variability, and credibility etc. Then, the term of service industries can be defined as the set of establishments which mainly trade or supply services Statistically, we may include all of tertiary industries in the service industry Also, we can broadly define servicialization of economy as raising the weights of service transactions and public services in the total economic activities. (Section I & II).
The influential hypotheses of servicialization have been presented by C Clark, D. Bell, and J Jershuny But, in my opinion, these theories are inadequate because they failed to explain the essential facts of the phenomenon. So, 1 propose the first and second hypotheses in the closed economy and the third in the open economy
The first, human beings gradually become sensitive to opportunity costs of services created by goods which they own or want to own, as the economy develops
The second. various resources (=goods) that are difficult to trade in the form other than services (ex. marketing channel, knowledge, know-how etc.) are accumulated as the economy develops
The third: restraints of Nature revealed on the way of economic development raise transaction costs and/or costs of enlarging production within the economic area, then promote to transfer the accumulated managerial resources out of it, and that accelerates the servicialization within the area.
The first is related with behavior of human beings, the second with attributes of the resources, and the third with the space of economic area. Here, I stress the point that servicialization in itself is the inevitable process in the economic development and is contributable to improving the use of resources If it undermines the economic progress, the main reasons must have stemmed from structural changes caused by the successful development and the restraints of Nature. (Section III)
In place of my conclusions, I propose three basic problems in the analysis of service industries. This first is the problem related with the controversy of unproductive services. This dispute has been caused by not fully understanding the relation between goods (=stock) and services (=flow). So, there never exists, if not disservice, any unproductive service.
The second is that we have to devise an appropriate statistical method to transform the current value of service product into the real one The present method totally neglect quality changes of services, the aspect of which is the most important in service transactions
The third is that any equilibrium theory is incompetent, irrelevant and harmful in the case of analyzing the kaleidic world of services They ignore essential elements such as irreversible time, space, and cognitive function of human beings In my opinion, neo-Austrarian theories of market process based on human action are very useful to the analysis of service industries. (Section IV)