Intermediate services’ impact on capital goods production

Abstract

The literature on intermediate services has shown that this sector contributes to industrial competitiveness and productivity rises. The production frontier is used to determine whether intermediate services contributed to the growth of capital goods production in the period between 1995 and 2009. The results found corroborate the hypothesis that the greater use of inputs from the sector results in an increase in the capital goods production in developed countries and indi-cate that this relationship is much weaker for developing countries. The growth of the capital goods sector’s productivity depends on the emergence of a growing symbiotic relationship between intermediate services and new communication technologies. The presence of these services helps to explain the greater dynamism of the capital goods sector in developed countries.