Information Services in the U.S. Economy: Value, Jobs, and Management Implications
通过分析1992-1999年美国GNP和就业数据，发现美国经济已转向信息服务主导，信息工作占就业和工资大头，但产品中的信息密集型任务工资最高，对管理和政策有启示。
It is well known that almost all of the largest economies in the world are already dominated by services. What may be less well known is that many are also evolving towards becoming information economies in the sense of both value added (GNP) and jobs. Of course, this evolution is less advanced in some countries, but the US is already well past the 60 % mark in terms of value added. We further explore the confluence of these two trends, by examining the double dichotomy of products versus services and information versus material (non-information) which divides the economy into four super-sectors. We do this by analyzing data on US GNP in 1992 and 1997 and the US job market (employment and wage rates by 821 occupational categories) in 1999. The main conclusions are that the US job market is also dominated by information work, that the largest part of the US economy in terms of GNP value added (in 1997) is the “information services ” super-sector, that the largest job share in terms of the number of jobs is in the “physical or non-information ” jobs in services but the largest share of the wage bill (in 1999) is in information related jobs in services. Interestingly, the highest level of wages per worker is in information intensive tasks in products. We discuss some of the possible reasons for these trends, and also discuss the major differences between information and non-information sectors, that have potentially large implications for management and policy decisions.