Productivity Measurement in Service Industries

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) presently publishes productivity measures for 173 industry titles, of which 39 are for the broad service, or nongoods, sector. In 1975 the bureau published a total of 53 industry titles, of which 10 were in the service sector. At present, the published industries cover 42 percent of all workers in service industries in the private business sector. After placing the service industry productivity measures in the context of the larger BLS program of productivity measurement, we will provide in sec-tions 2.1-2.3 basic information about the industry productivity measures, in-cluding the measurement model used by the bureau. Section 2.4 describes the methods used for specific industries; the discussion groups the industries into broad sectors, such as transportation, trade, and communications. Figures 2.1-2.7, should be examined in conjunction with section 2.4 because they illustrate the construction of several of the measures. Section 2.5 examines trends in the measures themselves, and section 2.6 discusses some compari-sons of the BLS measures and the industry output measures developed by the