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CHAPTER 4: THE LABOUR SECTOR
General considerations
4.1
Information now available for the full year 1981
confirms the trends discussed in previous Economic Reports. Overall employment grew fairly rapidly in 1981, although there was some slowing down in the last quarter. Employment in the
tertiary services sector grew at a faster rate than employment
in the manufacturing sector. The unemployment rate fell
during the year. In consequence,
manufacturing
started to increase again in real terms.
wage rates
4.2
A definitive view on developments in the first
quarter of 1982 cannot be formulated until statistics on the
labour force and on wage rates referring to March 1982 become available in the second quarter of this year. Meanwhile, the general impression is that conditions were stable. But
because of a general fall in the growth rates of consumer demand and of export demand, the unemployment rate may have stopped decreasing.
The supply of and the demand for labour
4.3
The growth rate of the supply of labour continued to
slow down. Net immigration (balance of total arrivals and
departures of legal immigrants plus an estimate of illegal
immigrants) in the first quarter is estimated at 3 326, compared with 16 415 in the fourth quarter of 1981. There are indications that the labour force participation rate, which is the proportion of the economically active population working
or seeking work,
to decline during the first
continued
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/ quarter