Figure 12: Jersey’s gross value added by industry, 2011 Public Admin. 9% Wholesale and Retail 7%
Agriculture Manufacturing Electricity, Gas & Water Construction Wholesale and Retail
Other Business 24%
Hotels, Restaurants & Bars Transport, Storage and Comms. Financial Services Other Business Public Admin. Financial Services 41%
Source: States of Jersey
This specialisation in finance is over twice that found in Britain. The industry accounts for 25 per cent of jobs in Jersey and eleven per cent in the United Kingdom.5 Such concentration on a single sector is unremarkable for an economy squeezed onto a 45 square mile island. To illustrate this, we have examined the industrial structure of all local authorities in Great Britain with employment levels similar to Jersey. Although the island has 2½ times the United Kingdom’s rate of employment in finance, this degree of specialisation is typical of authority areas of a similar size. This can be seen in Figure 13, which shows a variety of United Kingdom local authorities, plotted against the ‘location quotient’ for the sector in which they have the highest concentration of employment. The location quotient is a measure of how concentrated employment is in a particular sector relative to the national average. In this context, Jersey’s location quotient (highlighted in red as point 0) is not exceptional for an administrative area of its size.
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Due to differences in data collection and reporting, the comparison is not on a precisely like-forlike basis.