In addition, the sector ensures that domestic and cross-border payments can be transacted efficiently. So from society’s point of view it is important that this sector is as efficient as possible – which means that its production costs should be as low as possible.
A rough indicator of developments in labour productivity in the financial sector can be obtained by looking at domestic lending – or alternatively financial assets – relative to employment in the sector. Calculated in this way, labour productivity was more or less constant in the decades before the liberalisation of the financial markets, which really took off in the early 1980s.