Service-oriented reallocation and value-added intensity in China's sport industry, 2018-2024: A longitudinal...

China's sport industry expanded while its composition shifted toward services during 2018-2024, but both the accounting mechanisms behind this change and the robustness of the pattern to the COVID-19 disruption and relative-price movements require careful qualification. We analyze annual national sport-industry accounts published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China and the General Administration of Sport. The analysis combines value-added shares, value-added intensity, a descriptive service-to-manufacturing value-added ratio, shift-share decompositions, alternative time windows, a proxy-based price sensitivity analysis, and crisis-recovery indicators. The service share of sport-industry value added increased from 64.8% in 2018 to 72.0% in 2024, while the manufacturing share declined from 33.7% to 26.5%. Aggregate value-added intensity rose from 37.9% to 41.7%. For 2018-2024, the decomposition assigns +2.50 percentage points to changes in category output weights, + 1.44 points to within-category intensity changes, and -0.13 points to their interaction. The between-category contribution remained positive in all alternative multi-year windows, although it was not always larger than the within-category contribution. Under the specified price-proxy scenario, the between-category contribution remained positive. Co-located services fell by 16.2% in value added in 2020 and rebounded by 24.6% in 2021, ending 4.4% above their 2019 level; education/training and media/information services did not contract in 2020. The published accounts therefore document a service-oriented reallocation over the observed period, alongside substantial post-shock within-category change and heterogeneous exposure across service activities. Because the series uses current-price data and crosses a 2023 census-benchmark break, the results should be interpreted as descriptive accounting patterns rather than causal estimates of productivity, policy effects, or pandemic mechanisms.