[OC] Vergleich der Beschäftigung in den USA und Indonesien (dritt- und viertgrößtes Land) nach Sektoren

OC submission comment:
Data sources:

Bureau of Labor Statistics [https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm](https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm)
Statistics Indonesia: [https://www.bps.go.id/id/statistics-table/1/OTcwIzE=/\npenduduk-15-tahun-ke-atas-yang-bekerja-menurut-lapangan-pekerjaan-utama-1986—2024.html](https://www.bps.go.id/id/statistics-table/1/OTcwIzE=/npenduduk-15-tahun-ke-atas-yang-bekerja-menurut-lapangan-pekerjaan-utama-1986—2024.html)

Tools:

Pandas for loading csv’s and doing transforms, matplotlib for data visualization.
I manually mapped the sectors to each other, which might result in some mistakes if some jobs are counted in 1 sector for Indonesia and another for the US.

Why I did it:

Despite being the 4th most populous country in the world, Indonesia is often unknown except for its famous tourist hotspots. I felt that it would be fascinating to compare it to the US to study differences between developing and developed countries and to draw some attention to Indonesia.

There are plenty of potential metrics for comparison, but I chose employment by sector as labour statistics seem quite underused compared to income metrics such as GDP per capita, consumption, or net foreign investment. It is people focused, summarizing an important part of what people in a country actually do based on the types of jobs that are available. Like all metrics, it does have limitations. For instance, we cannot conclude from the chart that Indonesia is a agriculture powerhouse; in fact, it is a net food importer. Nevertheless, I view this chart as providing a rough direction for Indonesia’s future. It’s a safe bet that as agriculture productivity increases, the workers there will shift to services such as health care and finance. It’s also possible the workers will go to manufacturing, as the Indonesian government hopes.

There are interesting questions on the US side as well. As a country develops and its economy becomes more complex, does that naturally drive demand for professional services? Is the massive difference in government employment an issue with my numbers, or does the US actually employ a whole lot more people (around 20M people) in local government? Should the US aim to grow some of its sectors and shrink others? There are definitely smarter people willing to answer these questions around here. I doubt I’m qualified since I just make these visuals for fun and to consider interesting questions.