Urbanization in the Commonwealth Caribbean by Kempe R Hope

Author:Kempe R Hope [Hope, Kempe R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780367212933
Google: Xs6gDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 46180158
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

The growth in labour force activity in the services sector has been accompanied by another trend in the evolution of the economies of the Caribbean. The growth of service sector employment has occurred together with the urban population explosion and the growth of women in the labour force. The services sector is the main sector absorbing women in the labour force. This may be hapenning at a quicker pace than the growth in the women's labour force because the service sector has grown at the expense of agriculture and industry since the late 1950s. Though the rapid growth of services sector activity is a new phenomenon in the Caribbean economy, it can be stated that one of the reasons the supply of labour has shifted from agriculture to the services and industry sectors has been the greater opportunities for employment in that modern sector which is located exclusively in the urban areas. The declining share of agriculture in total employment is a reasonable quantitative index of the degree and evolution of urbanization.

It is obvious then that the structural changes occurring in the sectoral composition of the Caribbean labour force are a major contributor to the rapid urbanization occurring in the Caribbean. The services sector (of which the major employer is the government) and the industry sector are found in the urban centers usually in one major city which is always, in the case of the Caribbean, the capital city. This type of urban primacy is mirrored in the urban-size distribution by the way one city dominates all the others.11 As such, Kingston, Jamaica, has twelve times the population of Montego Bay, for example.

Moreover, such urban primacy has led to the creation of organized labour markets in the urban areas. The organized labour markets comprise virtually all public sector jobs and that part of the private sector in which conditions of employment are subject to some degree of collective bargining. They account for between thirty and fifty percent of total employment, and wages and related benefits tend to be somewhat better than in the unorganized labour market.12

However, how effectively and efficiently the service and industry sectors can continue to absorb such a large influx of workers remains to be seen. This, of course, will be dependent on the extent to which the traditional agricultural sector is left behind the more modern industrial and service sectors. Since the modern sector is often characterized by relatively higher wage rates, there is usually a supply of labour available to this sector. Therefore, the growth of employment in the modern sector is primarily determined by the growth in the demand for labour.13

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