The proportion of the agriculture, forestry, stock farming, and fishery workforce is extremely high. The industrial structure consists of 52.7% represented by the primary industries, 27.2% by the secondary industries (manufacturing and construction), and the merely 20.1% of the tertiary industries (all the rest other than the primary and the secondary).2)
(2) Projection of Future Labor Force in the three Northeast Provinces With the aid of data from the population census, the total and workforce populations in the three northeast provinces from 1990 through 2010 have been estimated.
The actual estimates were obtained from each province, and the totals for each item for each province are shown in Table 4.
As clearly observed in Table 4, the total population of these provinces is expected to increase to 109.12 million in 2000, 67.9% of which represents 74.07 million of the productive-age (15 to 59) population. In 2010, the total population will be 115.03 million, and the productive-age population will be 79.59 million or 69.2% of the former. Likewise, in the next 20 years or so, it is expected that the labor resources in the three provinces will continue to be abundant. The scale of the productive-age population and the age structure are results of the various of birth rate and mortality rate in the past.
(3) Increase of Labor Force in 1990s
In the three northeast provinces, the total productive-age population is considered likely to increase by 16.22 million to 74.07 million before 2000, and by a further 16.53 million to approx. 80 million (79.58 mil) toward 2010. Consequently, the labor force in these provinces has the following features at the present time.
Firstly, the 1990 productive-age population in the provinces was 64.33 million, in which the actual employed are 52,70 million denoting an 81.9% utilization rate of the labor resources. Even if the utilization rate was assumed to be 85%, subtracting the proportion of students and soldiers - 10% from the productive-age group, - still 1.98 million people would remain unemployed. In the 1990s, 1.46 million new job-seekers must be employed each year and, in addition, at least 200,000 of the employed (as a result of an increase in the employment rate) must be found positions each year.
