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KILM 4. Employment by sector
Introduction
The indicator for employment by sector divides employment into three broad groupings of economic activity: agriculture, industry and services. Table 4a presents data for 187 economies for the three sectors as a percentage of total employment. All regional groupings are covered, although only for one or two years in the majority of economies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa. Because users may be interested in analysing trends in employment in greater detail, since the second edition, KILM has incorporated two tables showing detailed breakdowns of employment by sector as defined by the International Standard Industrial Classification of all Economic Activities, Revisions 2 (1968) and 3 (1990). Table 4b presents employment by the latest revision, ISIC 3, tabulation category as a percentage of total employment, while table 4c presents employment by ISIC 2 major division wherever data exist. Because of the relatively recent date of ISIC 3, many economies have not yet converted their classification systems accordingly, which explains the greater coverage for the table relating to ISIC 2. Percentage breakdowns are shown by sex for virtually all economies covered.
Trends
Figure 4a. Employment distribution by sector, latest years
A review of the data showed four categories of sectoral distribution. The vast majority of economies have the largest share of employment in the services sector, followed by industry and a small proportion, usually less than 10 per cent, in agriculture. The second-largest group, consisting predominantly of transition economies and economies in Asia, has the largest proportion of people employed in agriculture, followed by services and then industry. Employment in the third group is largest in services, then agriculture, then industry. China is the only economy in the fourth group with the largest share of employment in agriculture, followed by industry and then the services sector.
Figure 4b. Employment in manufacturing, 1990, 1995 and 2001
The share of employment in manufacturing declined between 1990 and 2001 in all economies for which data are available, except Honduras and Italy. In Honduras, the share of employment in manufacturing increased from 11 per cent in 1990 to 18 per cent in 1995 before falling again to 15 per cent in 2001. Italy saw a very slight increase in employment in manufacturing, from 22 to 23 per cent, in the same period. The decrease in other economies varied from 18 percentage points in Hong Kong, China to only 0.3 points in Mexico. Mexico saw a larger decline in manufacturing employment between 1990 and 1995 (4 percentage points) but this then increased by 3 points between 1995 and 2001. By 2001, only seven economies reported shares of employment in manufacturing at or above the 20 per cent mark – Estonia, Finland, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal and the Republic of Korea.
Figure 4c. Employment distribution by sector, for males and females, latest years
Figure 4c shows the distribution of employment by sector for men and women. There are higher proportions of men than women in industry in all but four economies for which data are available – Honduras, Macau, China, Maldives and Morocco – whereas a higher proportion of women than men work in the services sector in 90 per cent of the economies. Employment in agriculture is also male-dominated, although not to such a great extent as in industry; the male share of employment in agriculture exceeds that of women by more than 5 per cent in only 30 of the 86 economies.
