Why productivity matters

Cuba’s National Statistics Office has published its data for 2009; here’s the table of contents with links to Excel spreadsheets of all the data. A few nuggets:

• The population chart shows very slight growth in 2009 (6,529 people) and projects slight negative growth through 2020. The chart’s data begins in 1774.

• There are 534 youth and retirees for every 1,000 Cubans in the labor force. This “dependency ratio” is projected to grow to 578 in 2020.

• Average salary is 429 pesos.

• There are 143,800 self-employed, up from 138,400 in 2007 but short of the 2006 total of 152,600.

La Jornada reports on the foreign trade statistics, where trade volume with Canada fell by nearly one half, and fell by more than one third in the cases of Italy, Spain, and Venezuela.