Employment and turnover of main manufacturing sectors – 2012

Employment and turnover figures are collected by Eurostat as part of their
data collection on Structural Business Statistics, to answer questions like
how much wealth is created by an economic activity or how it participates in
the economy’s growth. The share of employment is measured as the proportion
of all employment represented by those persons working for a specific
production sector. Turnover is defined as the amounts invoiced, corresponding
to market sales of goods, including all duties and taxes invoiced to the
customer with the exception of VAT, and including all other charges such as
transport and packaging. Data availability is restricted for confidentiality reasons
in Malta and Luxembourg, as well as in some specific sectors like tobacco,
refinery and pharmaceutical products in Belgium, Bulgaria, Sweden and
the United Kingdom. Major manufacturing sectors used here correspond to
ad hoc groupings of the two-digit positions of section C in the classification
of economic activities NACE Rev.2.
Around 53% of all employees in the EU work either for the Food, Drinks and
Tobacco industries (17%), for the Metals and Machinery sector (27%) or in
Wood and Furniture manufactures (9%). Industries within the Metals and
Machinery group provide jobs to 36% of the total workforce in Denmark, 35% in Sweden and Austria, 34% in Finland, Germany and Italy, 33% and 32%
in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and to 31% in the Netherlands and in
Slovenia. Textile and clothing, including leather manufactures, employ 26%
of the working force in Portugal, Bulgaria and Romania, but do not count
among the three main sources of turnover, while the food industries are the
main sector of employment in Cyprus, Croatia and Greece where they contribute
with respectively 47%, 33% and 23% to the turnover from manufacturing.
One fifth of the turnover from European manufactures comes from
the Refinery, Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals industries, which contribute
to more than 35% of the manufacturing-generated turnover in Greece, Ireland
and the Netherlands, whilst the wood and furniture industries are the
main source of turnover in Latvia (24%), where it is also the most important
sector of employment (25%), and in Estonia where it provides 22% of the manufacturing jobs.
Data source: Eurostat