thunder wrote:

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 05:35:01 +0000, Jonathan Ball wrote:


Calif Bill wrote:


Former Swiss customer of mine was one of the largest newspaper
typesetting equipment suppliers in Europe.

That's nice.

Look at the numbers: services accounts for about double the percentage of
"industry" in the Swiss economy, and a substantial part of "industry" is
service anyway.


I would suggest that does make them a manufacturing economy.

I would suggest you have an undefined, incoherently
imagined dividing line. Did you not read that
Switzerland's service sector is DOUBLE the size of
their "industry" sector? Furthermore, most of what's
included in "manufacturing" is actually services, as
the experience of General Motors in acquiring EDS and
them moving all of their IT staff to it demonstrates.
At the stroke of a pen, those employees suddenly were
reclassified as "service" employees. The same number
of cars were still being manufactured, but the
"manufacturing" sector, as measured by number of
employees, shrank, while the "service" sector grew.

That
breakdown is equivalent to Germany's, and only slightly less than Japan's.
We on the other hand are a service economy.

Switzerland, Germany and Japan also are service
economies; the weighting is roughly 2:1 in favor of
services.


Germany:
industry 33.4%, agriculture 2.8%, services 63.8% (1999)

Japan:
agricultu 1.4% industry: 30.9% services: 67.7% (2001 est.)

USA:
agricultu 2% industry: 18% services: 80% (2002)

Numbers taken from CIA Factbook:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/