Trends in Employment
One of the most significant developments in Georgia’s LABOR market since the beginning of transition has been the change in the structure of employment. Although Agriculture has always been a predominant sector of employment and income, it has more than doubled its share of total employment since the beginning of the transition period. As shown in the chart and table below, agriculture’s share of total employment increased from 25.6% in 1990 to 52.2% in 1999. At the same time, the employment shares of industry and construction collapsed from 20% to 8%, and from 10% to 1.4% respectively. Industrial production is now essentially limited to electricity generation and bread making. Moreover, this trend seems to be continuing as agricultural employment increased its share of total employment by 4% in just one year (1998-1999), whereas that of the industry and service sectors fell by 1% and 3% respectively.
Some of the growth in agricultural work can be explained the very loose definition of employment, whereby anyone working for at least one hour during the reference week is considered employed. Read more
Self-Employment in Georgia
The self-employed make up the majority of the employed population; 58% of all of Georgia’s employed are self-employed, and this share seems to continue to increase. These figures are extremely high if compared to the EU, for instance, where only 14% of the employed are self-employed (European Commission Employment and Social Affairs, 2000, p.85). Similarly, in other countries of both Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, self-employment accounts for only a fraction of total employment; 9.7% in the Russian Federation and 14.4% in the Czech Republic (O’Leary et al., 2001, p. 16).
As can be seen from the above chart, the large majority (83%) of self-employment is in rural areas, where it accounts for 79% of total employment. Moreover, it appears that this trend could be increasing as the ratio of self-employed to paid employees in rural areas increased from 3.5:1 to 3.8:1 in just 1 year. Read more
