Booming job sectors in Malaga: it's not just about hospitality and tourism

Malaga is currently creating jobs at full speed. Such is the revelation from Spain's latest Labour Force Survey (EPA) with the second quarter of 2024 showing that employment has increased by 50,000 people, a figure never seen before.

But what kind of jobs are being created? Are we looking at the typical summer season recruitment by hotels, bars and restaurants, boosted this year by the excellent forecasts on tourism numbers? Or are opportunities also being generated in other sectors of the economy? The EPA can only give a limited answer to this question, as it only distinguishes between four main categories: services, industry, construction and agriculture. Therefore, of the 50,000 jobs created in the second quarter, 31,000 were in the services sector and 17,000 in construction, while the other two remained virtually unchanged.

If, instead of counting the jobs created in a single quarter, we counted it by year (i.e. comparing second quarter with second quarter, which eliminates the seasonal effect), it turns out somewhat different. Of the 47,000 jobs that Malaga has added in this quarter it is not the service industries that have contributed the most jobs, but rather construction with 24,000. This is followed by services at 13,000 and thirdly by industry with 9,500.

So, to begin with, not everything is tied up in services: a third of the growth in the last quarter and half of the cumulative growth in the last year (eliminating the cyclical factor of the start of the tourist season) has come from construction, which is close to 80,000 employees (the highest figure since 2008). However, when we talk about services, we tend to think automatically of the hotel and restaurant industry, but in reality it is a large catch-all which encompasses many other business activities: from administrative, legal and professional services to new technologies, health and education.

So how can we find out in which of these specific sectors within services are the jobs being created? Well, we have to leave the EPA and go to the statistics on Social Security enrolments - who has signed on as being employed? A note of caution here: both sources of data are different and, therefore, their results do not coincide exactly, nor should they. The EPA is a survey of a sample of the population (130,000 people throughout Spain) over a single quarter (in this case, from April to June), while the Social Security enrolment figures come from the Social Security General Treasury (TGSS) and refer to a specific month (we have taken those for June). The trend reflected in both is similar, indicating strong growth in employment. However, the data are different: while the EPA speaks of 47,000 jobs created between the second quarter of 2023 and 2024 in Malaga province, Social Security numbers reflect an increase of almost 27,000 contributors from June to June.

With this caveat in mind, let us analyse how the 27,000 new contributors that the province has gained between June 2023 and June 2024 have been distributed. The sector that has added the most affiliates is the hospitality industry (understood as hotels, bars and restaurants): 5,550, so it has increased from 102,838 to some 108,390. The other activities that have also contributed significantly to this growth in employment include commerce, which continues to have the most workers and in the last twelve months has added another 2,700 (it now stands at 124,000). Similarly, administrative and auxiliary services, a section that encompasses "rental activities, employment-related activities, travel agencies and tour operators, security and enquiry activities, building services and gardening activities, office administrative activities and other business support activities", and which has created 2,654 new jobs in the last year (it now has more than 62,000 employed), ranking it third.

The fourth sector that is creating the most jobs in Malaga is "professional, scientific and technical activities", which has added 2,337 affiliates from June 2023 to June 2024 (and already has 39,000). This group includes legal and accounting activities, business management consultancy, architectural and engineering technical services, technical testing and analysis, research and development, advertising and market research and veterinary services, among others.

This is followed by construction, with 2,308 new contributors in one year (now at almost 65,000). Finally, in sixth and seventh place, two sectors as important as education and health and social services, where 2,260 and 2,061 new jobs have been created respectively (no distinction is made here between public and private sectors).

There are two other sectors which, although below the previous ones in numbers, have also grown by more than a thousand workers: transport and logistics and public administration (without including teachers or doctors, but including other staff in the justice system, the tax authorities, the security forces and other civil servants). For their part, both real estate activities and the technology sector (called "Information and communications" by the TGSS) have gained around 900 workers. In the latter case, although the figure may seem small compared with the 5,550 in the hospitality sector, it represents a very strong relative growth given the small size of this sector (it now has 21,600 affiliates).

There are only two areas of jobs activity that show a decrease in affiliates between June 2023 and June 2024 in Malaga, and they have done so anecdotally: "activities of households as employers" (-98, domestic help), extractive industries (-41, e.g. mining, gas, oil) and extra-territorial organisations (-17, e.g. those who work overseas in the INE-listed organisations, which does not include those in the diplomatic service).