Service economy
Service economy includes commodity and product relations as part of the service sector. There is "no such thing as a product" or "commodity" in this vision. Everything purchased has services necessarily assumed within it, mostly nature's services and state services along with such corporate services as warranty and product stewardship. Benefits of looking at all economics in terms of services include:
- Much easier integration with accounting for nature's services
- Much easier integration with state services under globalization, e.g. meat inspection is a service that is assumed within a product price, but which can vary quite drastically with jurisdiction, with some serious effects.
- Association of goods movements in commodity markets with negative commodity (representing emissions or other pollution, biodiversity loss, biosecurity risk) public bads so that no commodity can be traded without assuming responsibility for damage done by its extraction, processing, shipping, trading and sale - its comprehensive outcome
- Easier integration with urban ecology and industrial ecology modelling
- Making it easier to relate to the Experience Economy of actual quality of life decisions made by human beings based on assumptions about service, and integrating economics better with marketing theory about brand value e.g. products are purchased for their assumed reliability in some known process. This assumes that the user's experience with the brand (implying a service they expect) is far more important than its technical characteristics
Product stewardship is often considered a first step to it.