Feb 16 2012
Gap minder World Data Analyze
I changed the vertical axis to the employment rate of population age 15 and older while keeping the horizontal axis as income per person and observed the distribution pattern of countries in year 2007. One of the surprising patterns I have noticed is that the employment rate of poorer developing countries like those in Africa is actually very high as most of them are sitting on the right upper portion of the graph. It is not the case that poorer countries has low employment rate, it is quite the opposite.
The cause of this paradox lies in the large population and unbalanced industrial structure of these developing countries. “The economy grew an annualized 1.4 percent in the third quarter as manufacturing and mining contracted, threatening the government’s goal to create 5 million jobs by 2020.” (Martinez 2012) factories and retailers are adding more jobs as the manufacturing boost. However, as the jobs that have been created are mainly lower level manual labors like mining and manufacturing, they are still earning little. In addition, though the economy of African countries is boosting through these years, per capita income is not able to increase significantly when we take the large population into account.