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Closing the circle

Construction and public sector-related employment have been major contributors to the current full employment level in T&T, creating some 70,000 new jobs between 2002 and 2006.

In last week’s column, I noted that the job creation in these two sectors is substantially the result of the current, temporary oil and gas boom.

To close the circle in terms of “interrogating” the full employment data, today’s column reviews employment trends in the non-oil and gas productive sectors of the economy: agriculture, manufacturing and tourism.

It is on these latter sectors that the economy will depend—together with new goods and services—when the current boom comes to an end.

Again, as in earlier columns, this review will be located within the 1973-1984 boom period, the 1985-1995 bust period and the current boom.

Agricultural

At the onset of the last boom in 1974, the agricultural sector employed some 55,000 people as the accompanying table shows. A decade later, as the boom was coming to a crashing end, agricultural jobs stood some 17,000 lower at 38,000.

Within five years, by 1989, the agricultural sector experienced a substantial recovery to some 51,000 jobs.

This job level held virtually constant until the end of the bust period in 1994. Four years later, in 1998, agricultural jobs were down by 20,000 to 39,000. This job level stabilised until 2002 after which there has been another dramatic decline to some 24,000 jobs in 2006.

While the closure of Caroni Ltd provides some partial explanation for the most recent agricultural employment figures it cannot sweep away the clear inverse relationship between boom and bust and jobs in agriculture.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing employment stood at 65,000 in 1974 and peaked at some 73,000 jobs three years later in 1977. Twelve years on, by 1989, manufacturing jobs were down by close to 50 per cent (36,500).

There has been somewhat of a recovery to an estimated 57,000 jobs in the sector by 2006.

I, however, remain sceptical as to the extent to which the Central Statistics Office is still picking up, as part of this sector, former manufacturing industries that have since closed most, if not all, of their production lines and are now simply importing finished products from elsewhere.

This is likely to be particularly true of branch plants of trans-national corporations, which, in the context of the “race to the bottom” in terms of the impact on wages of so-called economic liberalisation, are centralising production centres in least-cost countries and exporting this output to other neighbouring countries in the hemisphere.

Tourism

The picture in terms of the final, major productive sector—tourism—is more encouraging. The Central Statistical Office itself lumps hotels with restaurants and wholesale and retail trade, which is not helpful. However, the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has been preparing so-called “satellite accounts” to estimate the direct and indirect job creation in the travel and tourism sector in various countries.

Data from this source are available for T&T from 2000 to the present and are included in the accompanying table. These data reveal a slow increase in direct employment between 2000 and 2005 from 30,000 to 34,000 jobs before a more substantial jump to the 45,000 jobs provisionally estimated for 2006.

For reasons that are not quite clear, however, the WTTC has estimated a substantial increase in indirect jobs over the last year such that total tourism employment in T&T is estimated to have grown from 90,000 jobs in 2000 to a provisional estimate of 131,000 jobs in 2006.