O Tertiary Sector it is the area of the economy that integrates the activities of commerce and the provision of services. This segment is related to the perspective that divides economic practices into three major areas, of which the primary sector is composed of agriculture and cattle raising and extraction, and the secondary is formed by the performance of industries.
In some perspectives, it is customary to divide the tertiary sector, considering it only with commerce and categorizing services in a supposed quaternary sector of the economy. However, this division is neither accepted nor used by national and international economic studies bodies, such as IBGE and IPEA.
The service sector, however, is very broad, as it involves all "intangible" goods, that is, everything that is offered to the consumer in the form of activities such as mechanical and domestic repairs, aids for appliances and technologies, educational activities, aid legal, telemarketing, leisure, tourism, security, transport, entertainment, among others.
Some examples of jobs in the Tertiary Sector are: teachers, lawyers, mechanics, waiters, guides tourists, commercial attendants, doormen, private security, sellers, administrators, programmers, web designers, among countless others. All these professionals exert their workforce not to offer a material product, but for a service considered useful to the consumer.
The commerce sector also ends up including a large number of informal workers, that is, who are not bureaucratically registered and who do not contribute with taxes. This type of occurrence is quite common in underdeveloped and emerging countries, such as Brazil, and illustrates the category of street vendors, street vendors, among others.
Informal work has been growing in the trade sector
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Currently, the process of economic outsourcing, which is nothing more than the growth in the proportional supply of jobs in the tertiary sector in relation to other sectors of the economy. In the United States, for example, around 80% of jobs are in services and commerce, with similar rates in the countries of the European bloc. In the case of the Brazilian economy, it is possible to notice this evolution: in the 1950s, around 26% of workers were from this sector, a number that increased to 39% in the 1970s and to over 60% in recent years, even though its share of GDP has remained around the 50%.
The process of outsourcing the economy is due to some main factors, such as:
a) inclusion of women in the labor market, increasing the demand for schools, day care centers, nursing homes, nursing services, among others;
b) specialization of companies, which allocate cleaning, security and other work to other companies;
c) increase in technological advances in society, which increases the demand for services related to electronic media;
d) increase in the number of jobs offered in the areas of human resources, management, supervision, administration and the like;
e) increase in the replacement of man by machine in the primary and secondary sectors.
With a few exceptions, the current trend of the globalized capitalist system is the concentration of labor in the tertiary sector in countries developed, an advance of this characteristic in emerging countries and a lower performance in underdeveloped countries, which are predominantly agrarians.
By Rodolfo Alves Pena
Graduated in Geography
