The Three Sectors of the Economy

We generally describe the economy as consisting of three sectors.

The primary sector is agriculture and the extraction of raw materials from the earth (coal – mining, drilling for oil) or the sea (fishing). Some of the food extracted in the primary sector, such as fresh fruit or fish, is consumed almost immediately after extraction; the rest serves as raw material for the secondary sector.

The secondary sector involves the transformation of raw materials into finished goods. Although, of course many of the people working for manufacturing companies do not actually make anything, but provide a service – administration, law, finance, marketing, selling, computing, personnel, and so on.

The tertiary sector includes the commercial services that enable industry to produce and distribute goods to their final consumers (trade, banking, insurance, warehousing, transport, communications, advertising, and so on), as well as activities like education, health care, leisure and tourism.

The number of people working in the primary sector is regularly declining because agricultural methods are always becoming more efficient. Western Europe and the USA already produce too much food with only 3 % of the population working on the land.

The secondary sector is getting smaller in many of these countries because much manufacturing can be carried out more cheaply in low-wage economies, for example in East and South-East Asian countries like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaya and Vietnam but not the tertiary sector if the activities require a lot of training, education, know-how and technology.

Vocabulary notes

to extract добывать

coal-mining добыча угля

to enable позволять

leisure досуг

to carry out осуществлять

Tasks