Importance of primary, secondary and tertiary industries for sustainable development

Abstract

Sustainable development is based upon three pillars: economic, social and environmental. From these pillars, the objective of this study was to assess the sustainability of an economy based mainly on its primary sector. For this purpose, econometric models were fitted using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) with cross data from 174 countries. As explanatory variables was considered the contributions of agriculture, industry and services in GDP. The results indicated an indirect relationship between an increase in the contribution of agriculture in the economy with per capita income and HDI. For other variables the direction of the signal was direct. Thus, from the results and literature review, concluded that a development dependent of the primary sector is incompatible with sustainable development in the economic, social and environmental perspective.