In Sub-Saharan Africa, the mix of export-related jobs is shifting toward services

The rise of global value chains has changed the way many of us think about goods that countries import and export. Consider the smartphone in your pocket. Is that a single, discrete product? Or should you think of it instead as a collection of distinct parts: a camera, a computer chip, a battery – each made in a different country.

There is yet another way to think about a smartphone and other traded goods, one that may be more relevant to countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere that seek to harness exports to generate more and better jobs. Rather than as a collection of parts, think of that smartphone as a collection of activities performed by workers in different countries: designing and testing the prototype, mining the lithium that goes into the battery, programming the software, manufacturing the chip, and so on. 

This way of looking at traded goods shows that in Sub-Saharan Africa, the mix of activities that goes into exports is starting to look more like the mix in other emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Slowly, over time, the mix has been shifting away from production activities, like mining and farming, toward non-production activities, which include management, engineering, and support services such as clerical and secretarial jobs. These activities tend to be better-paid and demand higher levels of skill.

The shift in activities is captured in new data on jobs linked directly or indirectly to exports in 11 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. The data have been added to an existing compendium, the Activities in Exports database, which includes 68 economies, 20 sectors spanning the whole economy, and five distinct activities. 

Figure 1 shows how the breakdown of jobs linked to exports has changed over time in Sub-Saharan Africa. While production activities accounted for 80 percent of jobs in 2000, that fell to 60 percent by 2018. In the same period, the proportion of support services almost doubled. By contrast, in EMDEs outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, production activities already accounted for less than 60 percent of jobs linked to exports in 2000, which fell further to 53 percent in 2018.

Figure 2 takes a closer look at production activities in Sub-Saharan Africa (left panel). It shows that agriculture and mining fell to about 40 percent of total jobs in exports in 2018 from roughly 64 percent in 2000. Some of that drop was absorbed by additional jobs in service industries, especially transportation and storage, and by light manufacturing, such as food processing and chemicals, and heavy manufacturing, such as electronics and transport equipment. By contrast, production activities in light and heavy manufacturing play a more significant role in other EMDEs, buffering the decline in agriculture and mining (right panel).

Now take a look at Figure 3 (left panel), which zooms in on the big increase in clerical, secretarial, and other support services in Sub-Saharan Africa, from about 11 percent to 21 percent of all jobs linked to exports, that we saw in Figure 1. Service industries were the biggest driver of the change, almost doubling as a proportion of the total. The increase in support services in EMDEs, by contrast, was more moderate (right panel). Among service industries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the biggest increases in support services were in wholesale and retail trade; motor vehicle repair; and accommodation and restaurants. Business, technical, and administrative services generated smaller gains.

However, among Sub-Saharan African countries, there have been stark differences in the extent of such shifts. Ethiopia, for instance, has been considered an exemplar of successful integration into global value chains, driven largely by the textiles and apparel industry. While in 2000 production activities dominated Ethiopia’s jobs in exports with a share of 97 percent, this share dropped to 67 percent by 2018. In Tanzania, by contrast, the job share of production activities was 95 percent in 2000 but only fell to 88 percent by 2018, because their share in agriculture and mining declined more slowly.

These findings have important implications for industrial policy. Traditionally, policy makers have focused on products when analyzing a country’s export capabilities. Instead, analyzing export activities can provide a more accurate picture.

For example, a 2024 study of 52 countries found that initially countries tend to shift to similar export activities in different industries such as from production in apparel to production in electrical equipment, as has been witnessed in Viet Nam. Only later did these countries start to diversify the activities performed within industries. This kind of diversification, where activities shift within industries, is not easily detectable using traditional measures based on products or industries alone.

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