ABSTRACT
Economic development has been uneven in Western and Central Europe. For example, less than 2 per cent of the economically active population is engaged in agriculture in the UK and Belgium, compared with almost a quarter in Greece and parts of the former Yugoslavia, and almost half in Albania. Throughout the region, the agricultural sector has been losing workers but, until recently, the economically active population in industry was increasing. Since the early 1970s, and particularly in the 1980s, the total labour force
in industry has been diminishing in several West European countries, and in the 1990s jobs have also been lost in some branches of the service sector, such as banking and communications.
