Importance of Services

The area of ​​services within the economy had its boom in the 1970s, when financial activity took over. business world, and then new goods began to be developed, unlike material goods, these goods marketed by the service sector have the characteristic of being intangible, that is, they cannot be touched, they do not have a physical entity.

What examples can we give of services? For example, when someone buys a tour package to travel to a certain region or country in the world, that is a service. As well as hiring insurance policies for automobiles, homes, life insurance, for certain material elements, etc., is also a service. Services do not end there: all financial activity, from banks to advisory agencies for investment in the purchase of shares and debt securities, are also part of the extensive list of services as an activity economic.

But there is also another important area within services and that may not be taken into account as such but for develop intangible goods can be considered as belonging to the sector: the industry of "goods cultural”. Cultural assets are those assets that belong to the strata of culture but are produced on a massive scale and therefore lose their status as exclusive to a certain elite or social class. For example, this is the case of subscriptions via the web to access extensive catalogs of films to watch online or download, the purchase of digital books (e-books) in online stores or the acquisition of a musical record that will be listened to in its entirety on devices electronic, that is, we don't have the record, we can't play it, we only have digital files that belong to each of the songs That composes.

Thus, services are the third sector of the economy, differentiating itself from primary sector, whose activity is the exploitation and extraction of natural resourceslike fishing agriculture, cattle raising and mining; and of the secondary sector, referred to the goods-producing industries, from the transformation of raw materials that the primary sector exploits. In this sense, the tertiary sector comes to complement the productive process, because in terms of the production cycle, after an industry transforms the raw material and produces a specific good, it needs activities of the tertiary sector: transport (Logistics), administration of the company, financial administration, commercial strategies, etc.