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

[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.