Yet more demographics (or "why manufacturing industry?")

[fivemack]

I've collected the CIA data on composition of labour force by employment sector (agriculture / industry / services), composition of GDP ditto, total GDP and total labour force, and by means of two multiplications and a division produced a table, per country, of GDP per person employed in each sector.

Thirteen countries: the big five nearly-developed nations (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China), Peru because it had an incredibly small agricultural sector, Serbia because it had a very large industrial sector, Uganda as a developing nation, Thailand because we were talking about it on James Nicoll's LJ, the UK because I live there, the US and Canada because lots of people reading this live there, et la France, car c'est la France. Figures in thousands of US dollars per year at official exchange rate

Country	GDP per agriculturalist	GDP per industry worker	GDP per service worker
Brazil	5.6	33.6	16.6
Canada	82.9	124.0	73.1
China	1.4	10.6	6.8
France	53.9	86.0	110.7
India	0.7	5.5	4.3
Indonesia	1.6	11.8	4.4
Peru *	151.9 8.3	11.1 13.3	11.6 13.1
Russia	10.2	30.4	20.5
Serbia	6.9	8.9	44.7
Thailand	2	16.1	8.4
Uganda	0.3	4.9	4.1
UK	79.5	113.9	79.3
USA	184.8	78.5	95.8

* I believe the Peruvian National Statistics Office more than I do the CIA

Spreadsheet here.

I'm not sure I believe these answers, which means I suppose that I don't believe some of the input numbers. Western farmers are incredibly productive, yes; industry is almost always more productive per worker than the service sector, yes; but the Serbian service sector three times as efficient as the Brazilian?

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Does "labour force" include just the employed, or the unemployed as well? And I think you may mean Peru has an incredibly large agricultural sector. (Which I support as often as possible; their alpaca and wool are very good quality for their price.)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure where you multiply in unemployment; the CIA has 'unemployment' figures, but their figure for Peru is for Lima alone.

The CIA really does claim 0.7% agricultural, 23.8% industrial, 75.5% services, and I think they're writing nonsense. Time for primary sources, I guess (he sighs).

Peru's national statistics agency has the 2007 census on-line at
http://iinei.inei.gob.pe/iinei/RedatamCpv2007.asp; my Spanish isn't great but it'll do.

Miembros poder ejec.y leg. direct. adm. pub y emp.  	  26,941  	  0.26  	  0.26  	  	  	
Profes. cientificos e intelectuales 	1,055,223 	10.29 	10.56 			
Técnicos de nivel medio y trabajador asimilados 	655,677 	6.40 	16.95 			
Jefes y empleados de oficina 	524,744 	5.12 	22.07 			
Trabj. de serv.pers. y vend.del comerc. y mcdo. 	1,582,796 	15.44 	37.51 			
Agricult.trabajador calific.agrop.y pesqueros 	1,314,707 	12.82 	50.34 			
Obrero y oper. de minas,cant.,ind.,manuf.y otros 	998,627 	9.74 	60.08 			
Obreros construcc.,conf., papel, fab., instr. 	1,042,501 	10.17 	70.25 			
Trabaj.no calif.serv.,peon,vend.,amb., y afines 	2,660,902 	25.96 	96.20 			
Otras ocupaciones 	389,154 	3.80 	100.00 			

but I can't figure out quite how you subdivide those categories; at very least that's claiming 12.8% agricultural, which sounds much more plausible and would make the columns more like 8 / 13 / 13.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Hm, OK, their census makes more sense than the CIA version.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Insert unfair national-stereotype joke about Brazilian attitudes towards service here. (Of course, you could make a slightly different unfair national-stereotype joke about Serbian attitudes towards service, too...)

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the Peruvian discrepancy depends on whether you count their coca production as for chewing leaves (they taste horrid BTW) or cocaine...

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

I think they taste quite nice, personally, but you have to get good coca. I should have thought to include that in my point below about the failure to account for the informal economy.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Do the rich-nation farmer GDP figures include subsidies? If so, they're dubious; if not, perhaps the subsidies should be eliminated.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Subsidies in the rich world seem to be on the order of fifteen to twenty percent - UK farming subsidies are about five billion dollars, out of an agricultural sector production of thirty-five billion. EU agriculture GDP is about $360 billion and the Common Agricultural Policy spends $75 billion.

So they are large enough to be significant, whilst small enough not to bring the per-farmer figures into the same ballpark as those in poorer nations.

I think of farm subsidies as being infrastructure-upkeep spending for the countryside: we want to keep the hills grazed by sheep even if it's a much less efficient way of getting lamb than importing it frozen from New Zealand. Though some aren't justifiable in that way: I rather doubt anyone would miss the sugar-beet fields of East Anglia if the EU removed its 140% tariff on importing cane sugar from Brazil and Mozambique.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

I think of farm subsidies as being infrastructure-upkeep spending for the countryside
The UK's subsidies must be very different from the ones in the US. Here, the subsidies often have the opposite effect: encouraging poor land use and/or production of food nobody wants. My usual poster child for such is the dairy subsidy, which is based on the distance the cow is from Eau Claire, Wisconsin (a bit northeast of the center of the country). The effect is to encourage dairying in California, which has persistent water shortages, rather than the Midwest, which has not only plenty of water, but better land for pastures.

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

I think the data on Peru is likely to be skewed by the failure to include informal economic activity in the GDP. A very large proportion of the population lives from agriculture, but the quantitative data on the economic contribution of agricultural households is probably incomplete because (i)coastal/lowland populations are more accessible to researchers and (ii) the economic output of a peasant family who are also tied into complex local systems of reciprocity and part-time labour by family members in the city is very difficult to measure accurately.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

The Serbian service sector probably scores highly by providing services to visiting or crossborder Europeans, whose currency is more valuable.