The labour force plays an integral role in a country’s industrial development. The collective skills of workers determine firms’ ability to produce and innovate, which in turn has a direct impact on economic growth. High-quality jobs and decent incomes are important policy goals, and the manufacturing sector is well-known to provide both. Policymakers need to understand which sectors create jobs, which ones pay high wages and how the workforce’s productivity and skills change over time.

This EQuIP tool provides quantitative indicators for studying various aspects of a country’s labour market, including employment, income and productivity across manufacturing subsectors. First, the tool offers valuable insights into the availability of workers in both the formal and informal labour market. By examining unemployment and underemployment rates, potential structural problems can be identified. Second, a comprehensive set of indicators measures employment and wages across multiple sectors and subsectors. This analysis unearths changes in labour productivity, which directly impacts a country’s international competitiveness or the ability of its firms to innovate. Third, by combining measures of employment, wages and productivity across subsectors, the tool can identify the strengths and weaknesses of a country’s manufacturing sector, determining which industries are thriving, and which ones may be declining. Moreover, it can provide insights into the relative performance of low-tech compared to high-tech sectors. Armed with solid knowledge in these areas and by benchmarking against comparator countries, policymakers can define economic and socioeconomic goals related to employment, wages and productivity. This information is crucial for identifying growing as well as declining industries and for assessing policy areas where industrial policy needs to initiate changes.