Crecimiento económico y creación de empleo en Asturias: Treinta años de luces y sombras

Resumen: La economía asturiana ha experimentado en los últimos treinta años una profunda transformación en su tejido productivo que no se ha visto reflejado en un crecimiento sustancial del empleo. La evidente mejora de la productividad, conjugada con una contención en el crecimiento de los costes laborales ha permitido a la economía regional elevar sus niveles de competitividad por encima de la media nacional. Sin embargo, su elasticidad del empleo es la segunda más baja de España, reflejo de una estructura económica poco dinámica. El análisis sectorial revela que existen una serie de ramas de actividad claves que estrangulan el crecimiento del empleo. Abstract: The productive network of Asturias economy has undergone a deep transformation during the last thirty years which has not prompted a corresponding remarkable employment growth, though. During the whole period, the regional economy has not been as dynamic as the national one. While Spanish economy was growing 109% in real terms, Asturias economy was growing just 60.5%. However, labour market behaviour was regarded as the actual concern when the number of workers increased by 55.4% at national level and only 2.4% in Asturias. Moreover, if we continue the series up to last EPA 2011 quarter in order to better recall the effects of the financial crisis, we will see that the number of employed people in Asturias decreased by 200 compared to last quarter of 1980. During the same period, Spain witnessed a positive job increase of 51%. In order to determine the key to this low-dynamic behaviour of Asturias labour market, we should analyse whether those changes in the regional productive network would have allowed Asturias economy to reach the competitive levels necessary to create a productive model where the economic growth should be compatible with a sustainable employment growth thus allowing the regional economy to get back the employment levels prior to the industrial restructuring. For this reason, Asturias labour markets productivity will be analysed as a key-point to understand the relationship between the paces of economic and growth of employment. Nevertheless, competitiveness does not only rely on productivity. It is necessary to determine appropriate labour force costs according to productivity based on their levels and growth rates in order to obtain reduced unitary labour costs capable of boosting the regional economy. The analysis of the productivity shows its substantial growth above the national average thanks to an economic growth model where a deep restructuring of the Primary, Catching and Basic Industry sectors led to employment growths and productivity increases. This has not taken place at national level since mid-90s where it is observed a growth model based on remarkable low-qualified labour force increases and on stagnation or even reduction of the productivity. Nevertheless, improving productivity does not guarantee employment increase unless competitiveness is increased. The analysis of average labour costs shows that Asturias has made great efforts to control costs. Therefore, this together with productivity improvement has helped Asturias to get unitary labour costs above the national average at the end of the first decade of this century. This remarkable improvement of labour conditions to promote employment in Asturias has not implied an increase of labour force similar to the one taking place at national level. Job elasticity has been used to measure the capacity to generate employment, particularly by relating annual employment changes to annual changes of regional Gross Value Added (GVA). The one-year delayed annual employment change variable has been incorporated as an independent variable in order to keep employment growth/destruction tendency. First of all, a data pool including data from all Autonomous Communities has been estimated by means of fixed effects in order to know employment elasticity for the whole regional economy. Then, an elasticity value has been estimated for each Autonomous Community using the SUR (Seemingly Unrelated Regression) method. The results show that elasticity in Asturias is not only lower than the national average but also the second lowest of all regions. The lack of Asturias labour market reaction to the economic growth implies asking ourselves whether we are facing a structural problem where economic cycle stimuli are not efficient, or, contrary to this, this is mainly responsible for employment growth or destruction in the long-term. Hodrick and Prescott proposed filtering method has been used to separate both GVAs and employments cyclic component of the trend. The results reveal that regions with greater job elasticity over GVA seem to give a more sensitive response to cycle effects. Likewise, Asturias presents once more the second lowest coefficient thus stressing labour markets low sensitivity to economic growth variations. The limited capacity of Asturias economy to promote employment is especially worrying when proving that productivity and costs convergence towards the national level is not exclusive of Asturias. Sigma and beta convergence analysis in relation to productivity and wage costs confirm that this behaviour can also be applied nationwide although convergence pace varies from region to region. As for the case of Asturias, the process has speeded up since the 90s after the hardest industrial restructuring process during the 80s. The analysis of regional economies behaviour has been performed in detail and carried out to activity level in order to determine the reasons for this differentiating behaviour. Based on the different productive structures of each region, we can find the reason to explain how rigid Asturias economy is when transposing economic growths to the labour market. Productive structure evolution proves the real differences between employment distribution by activity in Asturias and in Spain. This no doubt may have some impact on employment evolution. Therefore, the analysis of productivity differences between Asturias and Spain reveals the presence of three relevant Service subareas within the sector; first due to their role within the economy and second because of the employment percentage they represent, whose inefficient behaviour restrains dramatically employment growth. Besides, the analysis of labour costs for each subarea confirms that their inefficiency goes hand in hand with their lack of competitiveness. In 2007, twelve out of the nineteen of these subareas particularly presented higher unitary labour costs than the national ones while embedding less than half of the employed people in the region (42%). Moreover, it is important to point out that almost 71.7% of this group of employees belongs to the three subareas mentioned above. This way, more than half of these 71.7% jobs are found in Commerce and Catering areas (55.4%), in Transportation and Communication areas (12.3%) while the remaining 4% corresponds to Financial Intermediation. Therefore, if Asturias wants to improve the competitiveness of its economy, it must direct most of its economic policies to these three subareas. Thus, the remaining 58% of employed people in Asturias belongs to those competitive sectors in terms of unitary labour costs, which allows the region to achieve similar competitiveness levels to the ones at national level.