In the present study, five stylized facts about China’s producer services are established through international, intersectoral and intertemporal comparisons based on input–output tables. First, the overall service input ratio is the lowest in all the sample economies. Second, most producer services are supplied by the traditional labor-intensive sectors. Third, manufacturing is the biggest user of producer services, and service industry is the second, while the opposite is true for most of the other sample economies. Fourth, unlike other economies, China’s “R&D” is characterized more by consumer services than producer services. Fifth, China has fairly lower service input ratios in almost all the industries. The backward and forward linkages coefficients are both smaller for “real estate activities” and “finance and insurance.” Policy reform should focus not only on specific producer services but also on reducing obstacles that are inhibiting the balanced development of diverse producer services that will help China to optimize its economic structure.

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• Cheng Dazhong is Professor at the Department of World Economy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
• Peter W. Daniels, a member of the UrbaChina research team, is Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK.