Services have long been blamed for their stagnant productivity and cost disease. This study demonstrates that producer services defy the cost disease. We explore, in the context of global value chains (GVCs), how the growth of producer services helps improve the productivity of final goods and services and how the effects differ for local and foreign sources of producer services. The GVC revolution, along with technological progress, expands the market and deepens division of labor across the world, which, in turn, magnifies the available varieties of producer services as intermediate inputs. The proliferation of producer services, along with their productivity enhancement induced by the GVC competition, helps boost the overall productivity and reduces the cost of supplying producer services. We develop a simple model to justify this mechanism and employ the World Input-Output Database to quantify producer services and the GVC division of labor. The empirical results are consistent with theoretical predictions.

中文翻译：

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生产者服务和生产力：全球价值链视角

长期以来，服务业一直被归咎于生产力停滞和成本问题。这项研究表明，生产性服务可以对抗成本病。我们在全球价值链 (GVC) 的背景下探讨了生产性服务的增长如何帮助提高最终产品和服务的生产力，以及对本地和外国生产性服务来源的影响有何不同。全球价值链革命伴随着技术进步，在世界范围内扩大了市场，深化了分工，进而扩大了作为中间投入品的生产性服务业的种类。生产性服务业的扩散以及全球价值链竞争引起的生产力提升，有助于提高整体生产力并降低提供生产性服务业的成本。我们开发了一个简单的模型来证明这种机制的合理性，并使用世界投入产出数据库来量化生产者服务和全球价值链的劳动分工。实验结果与理论预测相符。