Tertiary and Quaternary Activities

Class 12 Geography

There are many professionals who provide their services against payment of their fee. Thus, all types of services are special skills provided in exchange of payments. Health, education, law, governance and recreation etc. require professional skills.

These services require other theoretical knowledge and practical training. Tertiary activities are related to the service sector. Manpower is an important component of the service sector as most of the tertiary activities are performed by skilled labour, professionally trained experts and consultants.

In the initial stages of economic development, larger proportion of people worked in the primary sector. In a developed economy, the majority of workers get employment in tertiary activity and a moderate proportion is employed in the secondary sector.

Tertiary activities include both production and exchange. The production involves the ‘provision’ of services that are ‘consumed’. The output is indirectly measured in terms of wages and salaries. Exchange, involves trade, transport and communication facilities that are used to overcome distance.

Trade and Commerce

Trade is essentially buying and selling of items produced elsewhere. All the services in retail and wholesale trading or commerce are specifically intended for profit. The towns and cities where all these works take place are known as trading centres.

The rise of trading from barter at the local level to money-exchange of international scale has produced many centres and institutions such as trading centres or collection and distribution points.

Trading centres may be divided into rural and urban marketing centres.

Retail Trading

This is the business activity concerned with the sale of goods directly to the consumers. Most of the retail trading takes place in fixed establishments or stores solely devoted to selling. Street peddling, handcarts, trucks, door-to-door, mail-order, telephone, automatic vending machines and internet are examples of non-store retail trading.

Wholesale Trading

Wholesale trading constitutes bulk business through numerous intermediary merchants and supply houses and not through retail stores. Some large stores including chain stores are able to buy directly from the manufacturers. However, most retail stores procure supplies from an intermediary source. Wholesalers often extend credit to retail stores to such an extent that the retailer operates very largely on the wholesaler’s capital.

Transport

Transport is a service or facility by which people, materials and manufactured goods are physically carried from one location to another. It is an organised industry created to satisfy man’s basic need of mobility. Modern society requires speedy and efficient transport systems to assist in the production, distribution and consumption of goods. At every stage in this complex system, the value of the material is significantly enhanced by transportation.

Factors Affecting Transport

Demand for transport is influenced by the size of population. The larger the population size, the greater is the demand for transport.

Routes depend on: location of cities, towns, villages, industrial centres and raw materials, pattern of trade between them, nature of the landscape between them, type of climate, and funds available for overcoming obstacles along the length of the route.

Communication

Communication services involve the transmission of words and messages, facts and ideas. The invention of writing preserved messages and helped to make communication dependent on means of transport. These were actually carried by hand, animals, boat, road, rail and air. That is why all forms of transport are also referred to as lines of communication. Where the transport network is efficient, communications are easily disseminated.

Certain developments, such as mobile telephony and satellites, have made communications independent of transport. All forms are not fully disassociated because of the cheapness of the older systems. Thus, very large volumes of mail continue to be handled by post offices all over the world.

Telecommunications

The use of telecommunications is linked to the development of modern technology. It has revolutionised communications because of the speed with which messages are sent. The time reduced is from weeks to minutes. Besides, the recent advancements like mobile telephony have made communications direct and instantaneous at any time and from anywhere. The telegraph, morse code and telex have almost become things of the past.

Radio and television also help to relay news, pictures, and telephone calls to vast audiences around the world and hence they are termed as mass media. They are vital for advertising and entertainment. Newspapers are able to cover events in all corners of the world. Satellite communication relays information of the earth and from space. The internet has truly
revolutionised the global communication system.

Quaternary Activities

What do a CEO of an MNC in Copenhagen, at New York and a medical transcriptionist at Bangalore have in common? All these people work in a segment of the service sector that is knowledge oriented. This sector can be divided into quaternary and quinary activities.

Quaternary activities involve some of the following: the collection, production and dissemination of information or even the production of information. Quaternary activities centre around research, development and may be seen as an advanced form of services involving specialised knowledge and technical skills.

Quinary Activities

The highest level of decision makers or policy makers perform quinary activities. These are subtly different from the knowledge based industries that the quinary sector in general deals with.