Service Based Economy in the U.S.

Now that the United States has changed from an industrial based economy to a more service oriented economy, it means that our economic revenues are now primarily comprised by the prevalence of intangible assets, provided by services and technology for example, and less by tangible assets by means of physical labor in factories and other manufacturing industries. Because of this change, industrial production and output have been experiencing a major falloff as jobs in factories, farms, and mines that were once plentiful, are being eliminated, while jobs in the growing services sector, such as in technologies, telecommunications, and entertainment are experiencing a massive growth.

We say that we are heading toward a more global economy because of the fact that competition in today's markets is global. This means that corporations in the United States can compete in foreign markets and vice versa, therefore U.S. corporations and foreign corporations become interdependent and thrive off each other. This can have a good impact on the United States because it allows U.S. corporations to seek materials and labor outside of the U.S. in countries such as China, India, and Mexico, where workers are paid a lot less money than U.S. workers, thus allowing them to sell their products for significantly cheaper than if they were produced in the U.S.; however, the tradeoff is that many American workers in the industrial sector lose jobs due to this shift of labor to overseas. In the long run this will be beneficial for the U.S. and although some percentage of workers are losing work, new jobs in the services sector, in fields such as computer technology, telecommunications, and language skills are opening up and experiencing growth because of this change. The European Union will play a significant role in this because all of those countries are much more powerful and able as a whole than they are as individual entities. Being able to pool together their resources and rely off of one another as one nation will allow them to become very successful in the global market and possibly even succeed the U.S. as the wealthiest economy in the world.