The services economy is pregnant with paradox. It employs our most-skilled and our least-skilled workers. The small productivity increase of service sector workers is regarded as one of the key problems facing us in a future in which four-fifths of the work-force will be employed in the service sector. At the same time, productivity-enhancing outputs from the service sector are the key to future world growth and development. While we can't get rich taking in each other's laundry, the failure to do so as the world economy becomes more 'roundabout' would doom us to stagnation.

This book provides a broad analysis of Canada's real estate brokerage industry, and hence facilitates a better understanding of the circumstances leading up to the regulation deal; for example, the continuing domination of urban resale housing markets by local real estate boards and the merger and franchising waves of the 1980s. It also examines and seeks to explain the persistence of real estate commissions at traditional formula levels, and the correspondingly substantial outlay involved in the resale of a home - an outlay equivalent to the purchase price of a new car whenever we move. More importantly, it suggests a number of further policy initiatives aimed at making the most of the regulation deal, for both government and homeowners, particularly in promoting  more fully competitive real estate brokerage and more efficient resale housing markets.

This study examines the trends and outlooks for four different ground transportation industries in Canada: bus passenger service, railway service, trucking, and taxis. Ground transportation is less spectacular in its growth and outlook for the future than air transportation. Nevertheless, rail and truck freight revenues have consistently been more than 3 percent of Canada's GNP during the past decade, with value added in just these two industries somewhere between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of GNP. These nominally small percentages are actually quite large for two industries as narrowly defined as these two have been for this study.