Tertiary activities

Tertiary group provides services to people, like tourism, education, healthcare, etc. Characteristics:

• Heterogeneous: Variety of services, different qualification of workers and size of the companies.

• Tertiary activities are intangible or immaterial. They need qualification and personal effort in the workers to offer a service.

• The tertiary activities cannot be stored. We demand a service when we need. Supply and demand are coordinated by the TICs.

• Tertiary activities must be close to consumers.

• The tertiary activities have a low level of mechanization. Many services cannot be offered with machines.

• The world distribution of the tertiary activities is unequal. In some countries 70 % of the labor force are tertiary workers, whereas in other countries the percentage is 30 %.

Classification:

1. Social services: are the activities related to the administration, education, healthcare, etc. Normally these services are offered by public companies, but there also exist private social services.

2. Distribution services: are the activities related to free movement of people, goods or information. Transport, telecommunications, trade, etc.

3. Services to companies: Some companies contract services from others: administration, marketing, investigation, etc.

4. Services to consumers: hotel and catering business, leisure, repairs, cleaning, etc.

Activities:

1- Why are tertiary activities heterogeneous? Give an example.

2- What are the differences between public and private services?

3- What are the social services?

4- Give two real examples of each group of services: social, distribution, to companies and to consumers.