I’ve been reading about investing and the term sectors comes up frequently.
The tech sector
The petro-chemical sector
The manufacturing sector
What are the economic sectors? How many are there? What do they encompass?
Thanks
Some of the examples you run across may be just informal usage, but these terms originate with the SIC (Standard Industry Classification) from DOL and NAICS (North American Industrial Classification System) codes from NAFTA. Industry is a more granular term than Sector. For example, petroleum IMHO is an industry, not a sector.
Here’s a good listing based on NAICS
There might be formal definitions of the various sectors in the field of statistics, but I think in a more general usage, the sectors are not clearly defined. The petro-chemical sector, for example, might be considered to encompass all the facilities that deal with producing and refining oil and processing it to the plethora of things that’s based on oil. Accordingly, there’s not a limited number of sectors, but a speaker can use any word he considers adequate to describe a certain industry with certain common properties as a “sector.”
There is a classical system of economic sectors described as the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors. The primary produces raw materials out of natural resources - obvious examples are oil wells, quarries, mindes, but also agriculture. the primary sector converses those raw materials into man-made products; it’s more or less the entire processing and manufacturing industry. Then there’s the tertiary sector, which is occupied with services of any kind - not producing things, but distributing them to consumers, or rendering immaterial services to customers. Attorneys, doctors, consultants, banks etc. are usually seen as part of the tertiary sector.