2015年经济学人 专业和商业服务 英国经济的救世主（在线收听）

Professional and business services

To the rescue

Britain's new champions are bean-counters and PowerPoint artists

IN HIS budget speech in 2011, George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, laid out a new vision for Britain's economy.

Finance would no longer race ahead of other sectors; a “march of the makers” would see manufacturing resurge.

Three years later, the economy is rebalancing—but not as he thought it would.

As expected, Britain's financial-services industry remains sickly.

It employs 56,000 fewer people than before the crisis,

according to a report published on March 31st by the Confederation of British Industry, an umbrella group, and PwC, an accountancy firm.

Nor are financial services rebounding as the economy recovers.

Figures from the Financial Conduct Authority, a regulator, suggest that, excluding back-office jobs,

the number of bankers has fallen by more than 10% since the crisis, reaching the lowest figure for a decade in 2013.

Manufacturing is starting to return.

Yet on April 8th the Office for National Statistics said that factory output is still 8.2% lower than in 2008.

Industrial closures have continued since the end of the recession—Dunlop,

a tyremaker, says it will close its factory in Birmingham next month after 125 years of production in the city.

Though industries such as carmaking are reviving, that may be more thanks to falling wages than to increased productivity.

Instead, professional and business services are picking up the slack (see chart).

Firms in this industry—which includes accountants and consultants as well as outfits that run call centres and other stuff essential to businesses—now contribute 27% more to GDP than at the start of the recovery,

and have increased staff numbers by 13%. Management consultancies have done particularly well.

Their revenues have grown by 24% since the crisis, according to Alan Leaman of the MCA, an industry body.

That has encouraged accountancy and legal firms to get into the whiteboards-and-flipcharts business too.

Much of the new demand is from abroad, says David Sproul, the boss of Deloitte, an accountancy firm.

Business-services exports have risen 21% since the recovery began.

Britain's trade surplus in services has doubled to 5% of GDP—the second-largest in the world, after America's.

Architects now earn over 50% more from exports than they did in 2009. Around half of the world's legal exports are British.

Many new clients are in Asia and the Middle East, where Britain's professional services are valued even more highly than its financial ones.

This success is reshaping both the capital and the country.

So many accountants and consultants now throng the streets around Shoe Lane,

in central London, that some have taken to calling it “Deloitte town”.

Large business-services clusters mean the economies of London and Manchester are probably performing better than those of Edinburgh and Leeds,

which rely more on finance, says Richard Holt at Capital Economics, a consultancy.

And more British manufacturers are selling services with their products, according to Tim Baines at Aston University.

Boosters speak awkwardly of “manuservicing”, but they may have a point.

Rolls-Royce now earns more from tasks such as managing clients' procurement strategies and maintaining the aerospace engines it sells than it does from making them.

Cynics say box-tickers have benefited lavishly from the weighty stacks of regulation that have been pumped out since the crisis.

But whereas earnings from finance and manufacturing are volatile, a bigger business-services industry should steady the economy.

Since 1985 the sector's share of output has grown almost every year, according to the Work Foundation, a think-tank.

It even created jobs during the recession. Bean-counting and data-mining are not glamorous occupations. But they do pay the bills.