Tertiary Sector (Blue Economy)

The tertiary sector of the blue economy is its services tier in the standard three-sector economic model applied to the ocean economy: the primary sector harvests or extracts (fisheries, aquaculture, seabed minerals, offshore oil and gas), the secondary sector manufactures and builds (shipbuilding, processing, gear and equipment), and the tertiary sector supplies services (shipping and port operations, coastal and marine tourism, marine insurance and finance, logistics, surveying, and research). The EU Blue Economy Report and OECD ocean-economy accounts measure these activities by sector, with coastal tourism and maritime transport among the largest service contributors to gross value added. The label is the conventional primary/secondary/tertiary classification, not a blue-economy-specific coinage. Tertiary activities dominate value added in most developed coastal economies.