AN OVERVIEW

The services sector has played a crucial role in underpinning the growth of tradeable goods activities in agriculture and industry, in generating employment opportunities and foreign exchange earnings (notably in the case of tourism), and in providing an increasingly wide array of personal and community services as incomes rise. It has consistently produced 35 to 40 per cent of GDP, and in most years over 45 per cent of non-oil GDP, up from 35 per cent in the mid-1960s. Over the 1967-92 period services output has grown rapidly, in all years in excess of 4 per cent and for half the period at more than double this rate (Figure 2.1, p. 12). Its expansion has been more “even” than that of agriculture and industry, where international prices, climatic factors and changes in policy regimes have resulted in a more erratic growth path. Throughout the entire New Order period, and in each of the four principal economic phases identified in Chapter 2, it has always generated at least 40 per cent of the incremental expansion in GDP (Table 2.1, p. 21). Also, value added in services has always exceeded the combined total of value added in the more publicized food crop and manufacturing sectors by a significant margin, even in the eady 1990s after the latter sector had grown strongly for 25 years. Accompanying this growth has been rapid structural transformation within many service industries, a transformation resulting in the fact that many of the service activities of the early 1990s bear little relation to those of the mid-1960s.