Growth and Decline Essay Example for Free

Growth and Decline Essay Areas of growth and decline in the primary, secondary and tertiary classifications of business activities Firstly the primary sector, obtain or produces raw goods. The secondary sector manufactures and constructs goods. Finally the tertiary sector provides services to businesses and/or individuals. Over time whole sectors can grow or decline. Absolute growth or decline means that on its own a sector is getting bigger or smaller. If this type of decline happened continuously, one day a sector would disappear. Relative growth or decline means a sector is doing better or worse compared with other sectors. It may be growing relative to other sectors but still not doing very well. Or it may be declining relative to other sectors, but doing quite well on its own. Overall the primary and secondary sector is declining and the tertiary sector is growing. This is because we as a country are becoming more of a service culture. The primary and secondary sector has decreased because we can now use machinery to do certain jobs that people used to do and so people have to find work elsewhere in the tertiary sector. The primary sector has decreased rapidly through time from 1980 to 2002 and the employment rate for primary industries has decreased by over 65% going from 3. 6% to 1. 4%. This is because people no longer produce their own food or own animals for meat and so as the years went on people started to trade the food that they produced and the animals they owned for other products which leads on to the tertiary sector. However within the sector the output has risen from. Fishing fleets, coal mining and quarrying are all examples of areas in the primary sector that has declined. This is because machinery can do most jobs that people used to do, foreign industries also became more competitive and imports such as coal became more affordable. As the availability of coal declined in the UK, and also became more expensive to extract more coal was imported. This led to a further decline in primary sector employment in the UK. The primary sector has although increased in its organic food production, wind farming, fish farming and oil and natural gas extraction. The number of organic producers has risen from 6,038 organic producers in 2004 to 7,567 organic producers in 2009 this is because the demand for organic food has increased as more and more people want to eat food without artificial fertilizers and pesticides. However even with this increase the primary sector is declining compared to the secondary and tertiary sectors as employment for the primary sector in 2008 is only 1. 6% of the UK whereas the secondary sector has an employment rate of 17. 6% in 2008 and the tertiary sector has an employment rate of 80. % in 2008. This shows that the primary sector is declining along with the secondary sector but at a much more drastic rate. The secondary sector is doing better than the primary sector as pointed out in my last paragraph however is declining largely compared to the tertiary sector. Between 2005 and 2008 the secondary sector was on the rise as employment in manufacturing increased and the output of the secondary sector increased. H owever as the recession hit, the secondary sector saw a decline of output from 23% in 2008 to 6. 5% at the start of 2009. The areas hit most were industries metal products, transport (engineering) and construction. Over 140,000 jobs were lost in the motor industry, BAE systems cut 500 jobs and SANYO closed its factory which made televisions – ever since no factory in Britain made televisions. Later in 2009 the decline started to slow down but hasn’t improved much since as companies are still making cut backs. Going back to 2005-2008 the areas that were most successful in the secondary sector were the food and drink industry, drugs and pharmaceuticals, weapons, ammunitions, energy, electrical and optical equipment and finally paper and publishing.