Working in preparation for the budget, I’ve been looking at some stats from the OECD. I was interested to find out to what extent public sector employment could be thought of as a way of protecting the economy, and that led me to the nearest approximation I could find, “Employment in general government and public corporations“. The figures don’t show any clear relationship to economic performance, but I wondered if they might show a different kind of effect. Here is a table tracking the OECD’s listings of public sector employment and child poverty.
Employment in general government and public corporations | Poverty among children, %, late 2000s | |
Norway | 29.3 | 5.5 |
Denmark | 28.7 | 3.7 |
Sweden | 26.2 | 7 |
Finland | 22.9 | 5.2 |
France | 21.9 | 9.3 |
Hungary | 19.5 | 7.3 |
United Kingdom | 17.4 | 13.2 |
Belgium | 17.1 | 10 |
Canada | 16.5 | 14.8 |
Israel | 16.5 | 18.7 |
Australia | 15.6 | 14 |
Ireland | 14.8 | 11 |
United States | 14.6 | 21.6 |
Italy | 14.3 | 12.2 |
Czech Republic | 12.8 | 8.8 |
Spain | 12.3 | 17.2 |
Portugal | 12.1 | 18.7 |
Netherlands | 12.0 | 9.6 |
Austria | 11.4 | 7.2 |
Turkey | 11.0 | 23.5 |
New Zealand | 9.8 | 12.2 |
Germany | 9.6 | 8.3 |
Chile | 9.1 | 24 |
Mexico | 8.8 | 25.8 |
Greece | 7.9 | 13.2 |
Japan | 6.7 | 14.2 |
There are reasons not to trust the figures here – is child poverty in the UK only 13.2%? – and simple statistics can mislead, but a correlation of the two columns comes out on Excel at -0.56, which is unusually high for social data. It does look as though public sector employment and job creation in the public sector are key elements protecting people from poverty.