Industry Employment - Ranking 2003
In 2003, South Sudan (2.03%), Burundi (2.45%), and Mozambique (3.39%) ranked highest in industry employment among all countries. Czechia ranked lowest at 41.28%.
Data & analysis
- Burundi — 3.10
- Timor-Leste — 3.80
- Mozambique — 6.44
- Djibouti — 6.68
- Angola — 7.20
The 2025 World Bank data on industry employment reveals a striking paradox: the top-ranked countries, with the lowest shares of industrial employment, are predominantly low-income, agrarian economies. Burundi leads at 3.1 percent, followed by Timor-Leste at 3.8 percent, indicating that their labor forces remain heavily concentrated in subsistence agriculture or informal services rather than manufacturing or construction. At the bottom, Gulf states such as Oman (39.4 percent) and Qatar (38.0 percent) exhibit high industrial employment due to their oil and gas sectors, which dominate formal labor markets. A structural reason the bottom lags is the resource curse: hydrocarbon wealth inflates industrial employment figures while limiting economic diversification. Looking forward, shifts in global energy transitions, automation in manufacturing, or conflict-driven reconstruction in fragile states could reshuffle the leaderboard, potentially moving agrarian economies into higher industrial employment brackets.
| Rank | Country | Value | YoY % |
|---|---|---|---|