Employment trends in the key sectors of the Andalusian economy

The economic downturn has strongly impacted the Spanish labour market, resulting in the shedding of labour with significant differences across regions. Among them, the region of Andalusia is one of the most striking cases. Since the beginning of the crisis, the regional economy exhibited more negative changes in GDP and an uninterrupted decrease in the employment rate greater than that experienced in the country as a whole. In this context, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of the behaviour of the Andalusian economy focusing on analysing the region's productive structure and how it is reflected in its labour market. To do so, the paper first presents a comparative analysis of the Andalusian economic structure between 2005 and 2010, before and during the economic crisis, based on the information provided by the corresponding Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs). Then, a shift-share analysis is carried out to analyse the effects of the evolution of productive structures on regional employment trends. The results show that there have been slight changes in the productive structure of Andalusia during 2005-2010 period and this has been reflected in a general decrease in its capacity to generate jobs. However, performance within the group of key productive sectors has been mixed during this time. Of those sectors, manufacturing industries and construction sector have been reduced further, whereas this capability has contracted less for the transport, warehousing and communication services and has increased for commerce services. In this point, the shift-share shows that the general economic climate negatively impacted the manufacturing industries both before and during the crisis, and this is reinforced by the sectoral influence over the complete study period and the continuing loss of specialisation. Although they are a bit more dynamic at the regional level during the crisis period, the above effects can explain the decreases in their capacities to create jobs in 2010 compared with 2005. The construction sector was hardly hit during the crisis period, exhibiting positive behaviour at the regional level during this time, with slight but positive dynamism at the regional level, making the decrease in its capacity barely lower than that observed for the manufacturing industries. Commerce is the most striking case, being the only sector, even among the strategic sectors, that exhibits good job creation performance during the crisis period. This behaviour can be explained by the modest but continuing sectoral and regional effect over the entire study period. In contrast, transport, warehousing and communication services, which was distinguished as a relevant sector with greater dynamism at the regional level during the crisis period, slightly reduced its job capacity, probably due to the simultaneous decrease in its degree of specialisation.