However that 23.3% undersells its importance. Primary industries like mining, oil and gas extraction have large knock on effects on the rest of the economy. Many of the retail and service companies would go out of business if the fossil fuel industry were to disappear overnight.
Right. I wish we had a better metric than GDP for capturing the downstream impacts of an industry.
Say a town grows up around a single manufacturing plant. That plant might only account for 30% of the town's GPD because people use their wages to buy food, housing, etc. But when that plant closes up and 90% of the towns income disappears, it's hard to argue that the plant only contributed 30% of the economy in that case.
GPD != economy. GPD describes how money is spent, not necessarily in what order it is generated.
Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town? I've never seen it applied to any unit except nations as a whole (or the EU).
I suspect you need to collect reliable information on imports and exports and capital flows to calculate GDP, and a town can't collect it because it doesn't have, e.g., a customs bureacracy.
