High-tech Jobs are
Hard to Find

Athens News

Greece lags behind other EU member states in terms of the number of people it employs in high-tech manufacturing and knowledge intensive services (KIS), a Eurostat survey released on Wednesday, has found.

According to the Eurostat survey based on 2004 data, in spite of the fact that Greece made some progress in th tech sector in recent years, it still ranks last in the EU-25, employing only 0.2 percent of the workforce in the high-tech manufacturing industry (or 7,000 employees), 2.1 percent (89,000 employees) in medium high tech, and 10.9 percent (473,000 employees) in low and medium low tech manufacturing.

In knowledge-intensive services Greece fared better 64.9 percent of the workfore (or 2.8 million people) employed in the sector, a percentage which is close to the EU average of 66.9 percent. However in other domains of hi-tech manufacturing, employment has dropped by around 2 percent annually in recent years.

The KIS sector represented more than 40 percent of total employment in Denmark (42.3 percent), the Netherlands ( 41.0 percent), Finland (40.3 percent), Sweden (47.0 percent) and the United Kingdom {42.1 percent) as well as Iceland (42.8 percent) and Norway (45.6 percent).

Among employment in approximately one tenth was in high tech KIS (3.3 percent total employment in the EU-25) In absolute terms, the United Kingdom was first with 1.2 million persons employed. In relative terms, Sweden, Finland and Iceland came first with 4.8 percent, 4.6 percent and percent of total employment respectively.

Countries where high KIS employment in 2004 least important (in relative terms) were Greece (1.9 percent) Lithuania (1.9 percent) Portugal (1.4 percent). Portugal and Greece were also countries where the least jobs in high tech manufacturing were registered in relative terms.

The situation is even worse outside Athens, where 40 percent of salary workers live and work, unlike in the other European countries where there is a low but steady flow of employees outside the main cities, mainly knowledge-intensive firms.

European regions leading in medium and high-tech manufacturing were Lombardy (Italy), Stuttgart and Oberbayem (Germany) and Paris.

As for the knowledge-intensive services sector, Paris led, followed by Lombardy, Denmark and London.

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