Forty Years Of Employment By Sector And Economic Development In 17 Spanish Regions, 1976-2016

Economic Policies of Spain, for the period 1976-2016, have allowed a great increase of employment in many regions but little advance on convergence of real wages with more advanced countries. Although Spain has experienced the highest increase in employment among the 5 major European countries, both in absolute values and in percentage, with an in increase of 40% in Spain, 11% in Germany, 23% in France, 18% in Italy and 20% in the United Kingdom, this has not been accompanied by other measures addressed to reach the desired increase of production per head and real wage, due to the lack of enough industrial real income. The analysis of production by sector is important in this regard. We analyze both the evolution of employment in Agriculture, Industry, Building and Services in 17 Spanish Regions and the evolution of real income produced by sector. While employment in Agriculture diminished during that period of forty years, there were important increases of non-agrarian employment in all the regions, with the highest increases in Madrid, Andalucia and Cataluña (with an increase higher than one million in each of these three regions) and Comunitat Valenciana (with an increase of more than 800 thousand employed people). Industrial employment diminished in several regions and there was little increase in industrial production per head. The lack of enough industrial development led to increase the foreign trade deficit per capita and made unsustainable the development of services after the crisis of year 2008. We present the estimation of employment equations for each sector, with a pool of 17 Spanish regions for the period 1987-2013, and the relationship between real income of Services and real income produced in other sectors. The main conclusion points to the convenience of increase real income per head in industry, in the majority of the regions, in order to favor sustainable development of Spanish regions.