William Beyers died on 2022 February 1st. He was our best friend in USA for 25 years and received the RESER Lifetime Achievement Award 2010 at RESER conference 2010 in Gothenburg.
Bill’s research was undertaken in 1985 for the Central Puget Sound Economic Development District, Seattle, and explored “The Service Economy: Export of Services in the Central Puget Sound Region”. This was Bill’s first piece of service research, and this led to his 1985 journal paper on “Export of Services in Post-industrial Society” (Papers of the Regional Science Association). From this moment, Bill continued to produce a stream of papers that explored various aspects of the Puget Sound and North American service economy. There are many important papers here including his paper published in 1996 on “Explaining the demand for Producer Services” (Papers of the Regional Science Association) and his work on producer services in rural locations. The latter led to an important paper with an intriguing title – “Lone Eagles and High Fliers in the Rural Producer Services” (Rural Development Perspectives, 1996). Perhaps one of his last service papers was published in Service Industries Journal in 2013 on “Evidence on service productivity change from input-output models”. Researchers and PHD students will be deeply interested by the quoted papers
