The structure of an economy is traditionally divided into three sectors, primary, secondary, and tertiary. The primary sector comprises of activities that are directly related to the use, cultivation, or extraction natural resources. Thus it covers, among others, agriculture, mining, and the extraction of oil and gas. The secondary sector is concerned with the production of all the other goods in the economy, which will obviously include the processing of materials produced by the primary sector. Industry and manufacturing are covered b

The UK economy has changed vastly since 1945, and the decline of manufacturing and the growth of the tertiary sector has been the most visible change.

The largest sectorial change has occurred in the secondary sector. In 1964 this accounted for 40.8% of the UK’s GDP, but, despite rising slightly in 1969, plummeted to 28.2%. As will be discussed later, the decline of manufacturing is the part of this sector that has caused the most contention.

The primary sector as a whole in 1964 accounted for 5.8% of GDP. Although it declined over the next decade, reaching 4.2% of GDP in 1973, the discovery of North Sea oil caused to increase to 6.7%. By the recession of the early 1990s, though, it had plummeted to 3.9%, and by 1995 had increased only to 4.2%. When these figures are broken down, it is clear that the profits from the oil had dried up by 1990.

Economists sometime combine the primary and secondary sectors and refer to them as the “goods sector”, in order to assess the size of these two sectors when compared with the service sector. It is equally useful to occasionally omit the construction industry from analysis of the secondary sector, and instead incorporate the extraction of gas and the mining of coal and coke. This reduced group is referred to as the “production industries”.

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