4.1++Economic+activity+classification

1. How can economic activity be classified?
Production of goods from raw materials and provision of services are essential to our lives. Food production and manufactured goods are particularly important. We use the word industry to describe the range of productive activities: These are all primary industries – they involve the extraction by one means or another of raw materials. What these? Few of these extracted products are used directly but are taken else where to be turned in useful and usable items. A couple of exceptions might be food from a farmer’s market or fish from the key that come directly off the boats.

These are secondary industries. These take either raw materials or part that have already been made from raw materials to make new things. What are these? Thinking about a car: It needs tyres, a windscreen, seats, electrical components, metal for body parts etc. None of these are made from raw materials in the car plant. The fact that these are often called car assembly plants give you a hint as to what is going on there.

They subcontract most of the parts of the car to other factories within the manufacturing group or more often to other manufacturers altogether. Those manufacturers that specialise in tyres for example, are renowned for their particular types of tyre and these are often put on new cars too. So at a car assembly plant, the activity is more like doing a jigsaw that making something from scratch. So we have all these saleable items. What happens to them? There all sort of other services that we need too. This where the Tertiary industry comes in. The other name for these are service industries. What do these include? What has been left out?

There is one final, and so far fairly small, group that we need to think about. These are the inventors and researchers and designers who provide expertise to the above groups. This is known as the quaternary sector. What are they up to?