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Spain HUMAN RESOURCES
Throughout much of the twentieth century, there has
been a
dramatic shift in the makeup of the Spanish population and
in the
nature of its employment. As late as the 1920s, 57 percent
of
Spain's active population was concentrated in agriculture.
During
the next 30 years, the number of people employed in this
sector
fell by only 10 percent. Starting in 1950, however, the
sector's
share of the work force fell by close to 10 percent each
decade,
so that by the early 1980s its share had shrunk to about
15
percent. Even after the economic transformation in the
1960s and
the first half of the 1970s, agricultural employment
continued to
fall steadily--by an estimated 4 percent per year between
1976
and 1985. Migration from rural regions to areas where
employment
was available led to the virtual depopulation of a number
of
rural towns and provinces, especially those in the middle
of the
country
(see Migration
, ch. 2.)
The evolution in the size and the composition of the
working
population offered an index to the country's modernization
process. Since the 1920s, the number of workers employed
in
industry and services had virtually doubled. Industry's
share of
the work force had gone from about 20 percent in 1920 to a
high
point of 38 percent in 1975, after which it had begun to
decline,
dropping to 32 percent by 1985. The service sector had
grown
steadily, from 20 percent of the work force in 1920 to 52
percent
in 1985, declining only during the bleak 1940s. It had
surpassed
the industrial sector at the end of the boom years in the
mid1970s , when it accounted for about 40 percent of the
work-force.
Despite the economic slump of the 1975-85 period, the
service
sector grew strongly--an indication of Spain's development
toward
a postindustrial society and its increasing resemblance to
the
economic structures of other West European countries.
Spain has been fairly constant in the portion of its
population actively involved in the economy. For all of
the
twentieth century, just over one-third of the population
has
either had a job or has been looking for one. A high point
was
reached in 1965, when 38.5 percent of all Spaniards were
in the
work force. During the 1980s, the figure hovered at about
33 to
34 percent.
Compared with other West European countries, however,
Spain
has been distinguished by the low participation of women
in the
work force. In 1970 only 18 percent of the country's women
were
employed, compared with 26 percent in Italy and 30 to 40
percent
in northern Europe. During the 1980s, female employment
increased, but women still made up less than 30 percent of
the
economically active population, considerably less than
they did
in Finland, for example, where nearly half of all those
employed
were female and where three-quarters of all women worked
outside
the home. Female participation in the labor market was
increasing
in the second half of the 1980s, and it had jumped 2
percent
between 1985 and 1987, when, according to an OECD report,
it
reached 29.9 percent in mid-1987. El Pais, a
respected
daily, reported that there were 3.5 million women in the
work
force of 15 million at the end of 1987, which gave them a
share
of about 32 percent of the total.
Data as of December 1988
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