Productivity of the Service Sector: A Regional Perspective

In this article we analyse the evolution of productivity in the service sector for the Spanish Regions during the period 1986-94. The study environment has been limited to marketed services. Within this group of activities, we set out an analysis for different branches of activity - credit and insurance, transports and communications, and other marketed services. The methodology used includes tools such as data envelopment analysis to measure technical efficiency, the Malmquist indexes to determine the evolution of the productive change and the break-up of total efficiency into intra-sectorial efficiency and composition efficiency. The results at a national level show a tendency to drop of total efficiency until 1990 and a later recovery until the end of the analysed period. This evolution is explained by the behaviour of the composition efficiency, while the intra-sectorial efficiency maintains quite a uniform growth in this period.