Introduction to the World Economy by Brown A. J.;

Author:Brown, A. J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1460978
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

CHAPTER 8

The Balance of Occupations

Farm Population and Productivity

ONE of the most striking differences between economies consists in the very wide variations in the proportions of their inhabitants with particular kinds of occupation. For the world as a whole, agriculture (in the broad sense of any sort of farming) is by far the most widely followed class of economic activity; about three-fifths of the world’s families live on farms. This proportion varies geographically, however, from three-quarters or more in China, much of the Middle East, the Caribbean countries, and some of eastern Europe to about a quarter in much of western Europe, about an eighth in the United States, and as little as a twentieth in the United Kingdom. The proportions of population in the other occupations vary to corresponding extents.

The variation in the proportion of a population which we find engaged in agriculture (or any other class of production) is partly due, of course, to the fact that some countries are quite highly specialized. The low proportion in farming in the United Kingdom, for instance, is partly connected with the fact that we do not feed ourselves—we produce only rather less than half of the food we eat, and import the rest in exchange for (mainly) manufactured goods. Similarly, in countries like Canada, Australia and Denmark, the proportions in agriculture, although not by any means among the highest in the world, are as large as they are partly because those countries produce a great deal more agricultural produce than they use, and export the surplus in exchange for (mainly) manufactured goods and raw materials in which they therefore do not have to be self-sufficient. The reasons for, and the extent of, this kind of specialization by economies as a whole will have to be discussed in a future chapter. For the present, it is sufficient to note that it explains some of the occupational differences between different countries, but by no means the greater part of it. If the United Kingdom had a smaller population so that it could grow all of its own food, it would still have no more than a tenth of its population on farms. The proportion on farms in, say, China, which does not export agricultural products on a significant scale in relation to its production, is as we have seen, six or seven times as great as this.

The largest single reason for this wide variety in the ratios of farm population to total population is one which has already been discussed in Chapter 4—namely, the enormous range of difference between agricultural outputs per man on farms in different countries. It is not very hard to see that, if a farming family can produce enough to feed itself and, say, ten other families to the extent to which they can afford to be fed, then only one in eleven of the families in the country will be needed on farms to provide all the food demanded—foreign trade apart. Something like this is the situation in Australia, New Zealand, and much of North America, as we have seen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.