From Output Recovery to Employment Gains: Sectoral Employment Intensity and Uneven Labour-Market Recovery in Saint Lucia, 2008–2025

Full abstract

Abstract

Did Saint Lucia’s recovery convert output into jobs, and who benefited? This paper constructs a new, reproducible sector-level evidence base by matching real gross value added (GVA) to employment for 16 industries and triangulating the resulting estimates with labour-market outcomes by sex, age, occupation, and district. The analysis spans 2008–2025, but its estimands use different, explicitly delimited windows: national annual outcomes begin in 2008; the strict annual sector model uses comparable changes in 2012–2019 and 2023–2024; and quarterly evidence extends through 2025Q2. This distinction is necessary because the official tables contain a 2010 census substitution, a non-comparable pandemic collection regime, missing survey rounds, and several identifiable table defects. Three findings stand out. First, the recovery was job-rich over endpoints: from 2019 to 2024 employment rose 15.9 percent while real GVA rose 9.2 percent, giving a cumulative arc elasticity of 1.67. Second, this aggregate result does not imply a stable contemporaneous sector response. The strict sector fixed-effects estimate is −0.10 (95 percent cluster-robust interval −0.67 to 0.47), and neither annual, quarterly, weighted, market-sector, nor source-independent specifications reject zero. An exact accounting decomposition instead shows that the 16 matched sectors added 14,063 jobs over 2019–2024, with about 57 percent associated with output scale and 43 percent with changes in employment per unit of GVA. Third, gains were uneven. Women received 50.7 percent of the national employment increase from 2019 to 2025, yet female unemployment reached 16.9 percent in 2025 versus 8.4 percent for men. Employment among people aged 55 and older accounted for 59 percent of the measured age-group gain, while youth employment was approximately flat. Sectoral and occupational segregation changed little. The paper’s contribution is therefore both substantive and methodological: it documents a job-rich but heterogeneous recovery and shows how a data-audit-first design changes what can credibly be claimed in a small-island labour market.