How does agri-business compare to others, regarding job creation and wages?
The following section describes the metrics on Jobs and Wages that were embedded in Deliverable 6.3.
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Performance metric 2: Jobs and wages
The European Council conclusion from 2000 set as strategic goals an economic growth and more jobs (European Council 2000). An obvious second variable reflecting viable business will be the growth of the jobs. However, in the GTAP model employment is not measured in persons but in monetary values. A growth in this value can have two reasons: more persons employed or higher wages. For that reason, we have no variable directly related to employment.
Jobs and wages in the sector
We use the model variable for total wage payments in the sector, which reflect the wage levels as well as number pf people employed. A growth in wage payments overtime is the derived variable used to evaluate the performance of a country relative to best performer in the sample.
Jobs and wages in sector relative to economy
This measure focuses on growth of wage payments in a sector relative to economy. It is possible that in a developing economy all sectors of the economy might be growing and yet there might be certain sectors that engage more people than others. To this end, we use the share of agri-food sector wage payments in the total wage payments in the economy. The growth in this share is the concerned derived variable used to assess the performance relative to other countries.