Samoa - Economic sectors

Calculating the size of different economic sectors is very difficult for Samoa's economy because a large proportion of the population works in the informal subsistence sector. In Samoa, there has been a relative decline in subsistence activities during the 1990s dropping as a percentage of GDP from 29.7 percent in 1992 to 17.7 percent in 1998, according to the Asian Development Bank. Over the same period, agriculture declined slightly from 21.2 percent to 19.3 percent of GDP. On the other hand, industry increased considerably from 15.8 to 23.7 percent as did services from 32 to 38.6 percent of GDP. In the labor force data, much of the agricultural employment is in unpaid village work—either informal or subsistence—so that it is difficult to compare these data

with those from other countries. Official counts, however, show about 23,000 workers in the formal sector out of a total labor force of 42,494.