An Analysis of the Industrial Functions of the Knowledge Service Industry:Theoretical and Positive Studies
知识服务业产业效能研究:理论与实证分析

Knowledge service industry is a professional service industry that helps various economic agents gain and utilize information efficiently. The industry has two industrial functions, i.e., internal industrial function and external industrial function. Internal industrial function means that the industry makes full use of knowledge and human resources in society to meet the market demand at the lowest cost. External function is that the industry promotes the advance in the economic structures by playing a positive role in industrial distribution. With the help of these two functions, the industry offers various kinds of knowledge service products to other industries by professional means. It effectively integrates the useful knowledge and information from social departments and individuals, and, according to the market demand of knowledge, effectively allocates knowledge resources to enterprises, individuals or public departments. The two functions of the knowledge service industry can also be observed in China. For instance, the development of the knowledge service industry and local economic growth are positively correlated, which means that the internal and external industrial functions of this industry are conducive to the local economic growth. Given that we use the knowledge service industry's production value, investment and environment for its development as the main indexes of the internal and external industrial functions, positive analysis based on the data of the whole country, as well as Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang Province, indicates that economic growth of an area is positively correlated with the increases in the knowledge service industry's production value and investment, as well as with the improvement of the environment for the industry's development. In other words, economic growth is companied with the growth of the knowledge service industry. At the same time, an analysis of relative data, in which national average levels are used as a standard, shows that the positively correlated relationship between the development of the knowledge service industry and the economic growth in both Beijing and Shanghai is weakened. However, the data of Zhejiang Province still supports the conclusion gained in the theoretical studies mentioned above. One of the possible explanations is that some statistic indexes are not suitable for research, because they cannot reflect the real conditions in Beijing and Shanghai accurately.