New York, NY (BBN)- Diversifying production rather than relying on commodity exports is crucial to boosting the economies of the least developed countries (LDCs), a quarter of the world’s total, a United Nations report said on Tuesday.
“Growth in the last decade has been high but volatile because it has been based on exports of primary commodities rather than a diversified production structure,” the study by the UN International Labour Office (ILO) says, calling for sectoral and export diversification away from commodities to manufacturing.
The report – Growth, Employment and Decent Work in the Least Developed Countries – has been prepared for a conference on LDCs to be held in Istanbul from 9 to 13 May, which will seek to promote a 10-year programme for food security, decent work, disaster risk reduction, climate resilience and clean energy growth in the 48 LDCs.
Recognizing the potential for economic improvement in the LDCs, it stresses that learning lessons from “islands of success” in some countries is “critical to design and implement new policies to facilitate large-scale access to productive and remunerative employment.”
Providing figures and trends for 2000-2009 period, the report shows that employment in LDCs has grown at an annual average rate of 2.9 per cent, slightly above population growth but much weaker than the gross domestic product (GDP). Most of the increase took place in the services sector, with industry accounting for a mere 10 per cent of total employment in 2008, up from 8 per cent in 2000.
The share of wage and salary workers increased slightly, from 14 per cent in 2000 to 18 per cent in 2008 but the large majority of workers remained trapped in vulnerable forms of employment that cannot lift them above the poverty line.
The report stresses what it calls the “heterogeneity” of the LDCs, showing that some regions and some countries have done better than others in their patterns of growth, investment, reducing poverty and social protection, among others. “LDCs at least need to model themselves on their peers who are currently doing better,” it says.
Of the 48 countries currently designated by the UN as LDCs, 33 are in the African region, 14 in Asia and Oceania and one (Haiti) in the Caribbean.
BBN/SI/AD-30Mar11-2:24 am (BST)
