The activities are those actions or processes carried out by individuals or organizations. The economic adjective, on the other hand, refers to what is linked to the economy (the science dedicated to the analysis of the satisfaction of the material needs of people from scarce resources).
The economic activity is the process involving the production and exchange of services and products to meet the needs of individuals. Each economic activity is carried out in three phases: the generation of the service or the product, its distribution and finally consumption. The whole process produces wealth.
You can divide economic activities into three main groups: the primary economic activities, the economic activities secondary and tertiary economic activities. The primary activities consist of obtaining the raw materials from nature: for example, planting and harvesting potatoes.
Among the main activities included within this primary sector, we can highlight, therefore, agriculture, mining, hunting, fishing, livestock or forestry, among others.
The secondary economic activities, on the other hand, involve the processing of raw materials (freezing and packaging to empty potatoes for marketing in supermarkets, to name a possibility).
This second group of economic activities is where construction, steel, manufacturing, energy generation, food production, the pharmaceutical industry, the chemical industry are found…
The tertiary economic activities, finally, are services: those processes that do not include the production of physical goods. Transporting packaged potatoes to the supermarket is an example of tertiary economic activity.
In this third group of economic activities, on the other hand, it is where we come across tourism, transport, education, communications, commerce…
It should be noted that economic activity can be carried out by a person (an independent worker), an organization (either a company, a cooperative, etc.) or the State (a public company).
It is also important to underline the fundamental weight that economic activity exercises in any country or region, its wealth will depend on it. However, each place stands out for giving priority to one activity or another, based on its raw materials or potential. Thus, for example, in Spain there are autonomous communities that develop mainly in what is the olive or the vineyards, while others are based on mining or directly in the industry.
In addition to all the above, when reference is made to what economic activity is, it is essential that a series of concepts are taken into account that are key to understanding and developing it. We are referring to issues such as inflation or cost of living, profit, service or good, among many others.
That without forgetting others, such as, for example, production, investment, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), speculation, productivity or even the market.