Long-term Employment Trends in Queensland

My post from the other day on employment and industry structure in Queensland contains data up to 2009-10. The following graph provides an outline of long-term employment trends by industry as a percentage of total employment, up to November 2011 (thanks to Mick Peel for pointing this out).

The percentage data and the graphics are quite revealing of the changes in Australia since 1984.

I tried putting all of the sectors on the one graph, but it looked like something Barry Jones or Kim Beazley might have designed, so I decided to separate them out for your viewing pleasure.

Remember that these graphs don't represent absolute levels of employment in the economy, just their relative importance as a percentage of total Queensland employment.  Note too that scales are different for different charts. Raw data file available on request.

Agriculture and manufacturing are big losers over this time period and remember that they had already been losing employees from well before 1984. Mining has virtually doubled in size, but still accounts for less than 4% of total employment. Construction has also grown, perhaps matching increased investment in housing and more recently in construction associated with mining and other infrastructure. That downturn in construction from 2007 to late 2011 could have been a lot worse without government assistance to the construction sector.

Wholesale and retail trade have not had the continuous decline of agriculture and manufacturing, but have done poorly in recent times, apart from an upturn for Accommodation and Food 2008-09.

It's important to remember that changes in employment may represent the decline of an industry or improvements in productivity. Those of you who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s (or before) will well remember how much more service was provided in certain retail sectors for example. Petrol stations are an obvious example, but "self serve" is a late 20th century phenomenon generally.

Professional, scientific and Technical services employment has grown rapidly since the early 1980s, while sadly education and training has remained fairly static as a percentage of the whole. I must admit that I thought that Financial and Insurance Services might have garnered a larger percentage, but this might represent the fact that Queensland jobs in finance etc might have shifted to Sydney or Melbourne.

Unsurprisingly Health Care and Social Assistance has increased significantly in recent years as have Arts and Recreation Services. Expect both of them to keep increasing their stake over coming years as the population ages and as young people increasingly "service" the recreation and health needs of cashed-up baby boomers.

Putting all the lines together reminded me of the start of that Barracudas song from the 1980s "Summer Fun". "ba ba ra ra cu cu da da"

Rock, Paper, Scissors in Queensland: Manufacturing Beats Mining

The ABS has recently put out 1312.3 Queensland at a Glance, which provides a wealth of information on Queensland for the year ending 2009-10. While there are many newer stats on the various topics available this publication brings them all together.

What interested me, apart from the fact that the significant migration to Queensland that occurred for most of the 2000s has significantly slowed, is the percentage contributions of industry sectors to employment and total sales and service income. See here.

What might be an interesting exercise before you look at the figures is to imagine what you think they might be roughly. Most Queenslanders, I imagine, would think agriculture would be bigger than it is; most would assume that mining would be bigger than manufacturing and retail trade. Contrary to these perceptions, agriculture is now a small sector of the economy and manufacturing is still larger than mining, especially when it comes to employment. Both mining and agriculture are of course more important when it comes to exports.

The ABS doesn't provide percentages so I added the data to excel, converted to percentages and sorted by size to provide a more meaningful assessment of relative contributions.

See here for some data on relative contributions of various industry sectors for Australia as a whole.

As you can see below, retail trade is the biggest employer, followed by construction, accommodation and manufacturing at 9%. Compare this to mining, which employs 1.9%. Now obviously some of the construction sector and retail jobs are dependent on mining, but so are these service sectors dependent on manufacturing, albeit not to the same degree at the moment because of the colossal amount of investment in infrastructure going on in the mining sector.

For a long-term and more up-to-date account of Queensland employment see here.

When it comes to contributions to sales and service income, mining is vastly more important, but still only the fifth largest industry contributor. Wholesale and retail trade account for 31% of income, with manufacturing contributing almost double mining's share.

As with the Australian economy as a whole, the real structural change that has been going on for the past half century is the shift to services. But let's not forget that manufacturing is still vastly important to the Queensland and Australian economies, not just in terms of employment, but in terms of contributing to a more diverse economy.

While we should avoid protectionism, governments at all levels, local, state and federal, need to think of ways to assist industry sectors without feather-bedding them. Assisting innovation, cutting red-tape, facilitating industry linkages (between industries and between industry and research institutions) and providing support for education, training and research would seem to be a good start. At a human level working on ways to keep employment high and long-term unemployment low is also vital.