Jordan INDUSTRY
Figure 8. Land Use and Other Economic Activities, 1989
Manufacturing contributed about 14 percent of GDP in the late
1980s. Much manufacturing activity related to exploitation of
natural resources and to the mining sector. Although extractive
industries were distributed throughout the country, about 90
percent of both small and large manufacturing entities were
concentrated in the north, in an industrial belt between Amman and
Az Zarqa
(see
fig. 8). Between 1975 and 1985, total manufacturing
value added grew at roughly the same rate as GNP, at an annual
average rate of 13 percent through 1980, then decelerating to about
5 percent. Employment in manufacturing grew slowly, and in the late
1980s was estimated at slightly more than 50,000, less than 10
percent of the working population. For decades the government had
emphasized industrial manufacturing development over other economic
sectors, but growing excess industrial capacity prompted a greater
priority to agriculture and water resource development in the 1986-
90 Five-Year Plan.
Data as of December 1989
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