Abstract: In China the service sector share has been growing since 1978. However, despite the increasing importance of services, statistics for this field are less well developed than statistics for the traditional goods-producing industries. The original method, by which the output of non-market services is taken as the sum of the inputs, is still used. This approach is open to criticism because it fails to take account of changes in labor productivity, which could result in a higher output being derived from the same amount of input.