V. ESTABLISHMENTS AND INDUSTRIES
D. Industries
| 5.40. | Industries are defined in the System in the same way as in ISIC: an industry consists of a group of establishments engaged on the same, or similar, kinds of activity. At the most detailed level of classification, an industry consists of all the establishments falling within a single Class of ISIC and which are therefore all engaged on the same activity as defined in the ISIC. At higher levels of aggregation corresponding to the Groups, Divisions and, ultimately, Sections of the ISIC, industries consist of groups of establishments engaged on similar types of activities. |
1. Market, own account and other non-market producers
| 5.41. | The term "industry" is not reserved for market producers. An industry, as defined in the ISIC and the present version of the System, consists of a group of establishments engaged on the same type of productive activity, whether the institutional units to which they belong are market producers or not. The distinction between market and other production is a different dimension of productive - and, more broadly, economic - activity. For example, the health industry in a particular country may consist of a group of establishments, some of which are market producers while others are non-market producers that provide their services free or at prices that are not economically significant. Because the distinction between market and other kinds of production is based on a different criterion from the nature of activity itself, it is possible to cross-classify establishments by type of activity and by whether they produce market, own-account or other non-market output. Thus, there is no difficulty about separating market from other production within the same industry, if desired. |
2. Industries and products
| 5.42. | As already mentioned, a one-to-one correspondence does not exist between activities and products and hence between industries and products. Certain activities produce more than one product simultaneously, while the same product may sometimes be produced by using different techniques of production. |
| 5.43. | When two or more products are produced simultaneously by a single productive activity they are "joint products". Examples of joint products are meat and hides produced by slaughtering animals or sugar and molasses produced by refining sugar canes. The by-product from one activity may also be produced by other activities, but there are examples of by-products, such as molasses, which are produced exclusively as the by-products of one particular activity. |
| 5.44. | The relationship between an activity and a product classification is exemplified by that between the ISIC and Central Product Classification (CPC) of the United Nations. The CPC is the classification of products in the System. It is a classification based on the physical characteristics of goods or on the nature of the services rendered. However, each type of good or service distinguished in the CPC is defined in such a way that it is normally produced by only one activity as defined in ISIC. Conversely, each activity of the ISIC is defined in such a way that it normally produces only one type of product as defined in the CPC (where each type of product may have a number of individual products coded under it). So far as practically possible, an attempt is made to establish a one-to-one correspondence between the two classifications, each category of the CPC being accompanied by a reference to the ISIC class in which the good or service is mainly produced. However, such a one-to-one correspondence is not always possible. In practice, therefore, the output of an industry, no matter how narrowly defined, will tend to include more than a single product. |
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