Understanding the Clark-Fisher Model: Employment Sector Changes Explained

in today's video i'm gonna be talking about the clark fisher model this shows changes in employment over time

uh we can see that this is on the igcc geography spec and here i've highlighted where it comes

across in the specification so before we look at the actual model the

the most important idea that i'm going to want to address here is the idea that the importance of different sectors

will change uh depending on how a country develops so we've got three main sectors primary

secondary and tertiary um and those will go up and down depending on where it is level of development the basic kind of

rule is as a country develops the percentage of people working in agriculture will fall and then other

sectors will increase so we see in the in the initial period that agriculture is very high but that will reduce as a

country develops uh here is a good example of

the amount of people working in agriculture i've highlighted um the countries that got 60 to 80 percent of

the population working in agriculture and we can see it's lots of central and sub-saharan africa

and some bits of asia a lot of the countries would be developing countries so i'm now going to look at the actual

clark fisher model a lot of this is based on actually what the uk went through

over its history and so it's not a perfect model but it's a good way of looking at different countries there are

three different stages um pre-industrial industrial and post-industrial and on the left-hand side it shows the

percentage of the population that is working in that sector so in terms of primary we see this

pattern happen from pre-industrial to post-industrial there is a decline the major reason for this is that

as we get mechanization of farming so we get technology improving farming um there is a shift away from subsistence

farming and therefore there is less people needed to work in farms so the people

that would have worked at farms are released from that kind of occupation and are able to go into other sectors

like the secondary and tertiary sector by the time we get to the post-industrial age which is what we

would say the uk is in now it's very very mechanized and there is very very few people actually working

um in that industry in terms of overall population secondary goes through a slightly

different pattern um it starts somewhere between you know 20 um has a peak in the industrial period

and then declines again um that labor that was released from the farming um in the pre-industrial period can therefore

go into the secondary sector and that's why we see this growth from the secondary sector

um people are migrating from those rural areas into uh towns and and want to work in factories and therefore in the

industrial period we get a peak a place like mexico lots of developing countries like brazil would be

you know have a similar pattern in terms of lots of people working in secondary china

would have been doing this as well the one good thing to notice is even though we do get a peak in the

industrial phase it's um rarely above 50 percent of the population actually work in the sector even when it's the most

dominant sector for that country in terms of tertiary um the pattern is kind of the reverse of

the primary sector it starts very low and pretty industrial and by the time the post-industrial period is it's

somewhere above 50 odd percent um in some countries like the uk now that would be above 70 odd percent

um the reason why we get this pattern changes as those wages increase um people will start to work in factories

in the secondary um sector um during the industrial period they get more money and if we get more money that means

people want to be able to spend it on something and so that leads to a growth in services the demand for services

increases and therefore um we get more people needing to spend them on everything from

leisure to education health care the the last sector i haven't really

talked about but is important to understand is the quaternary sector only starts to really appear in the

post-industrial period and and it's a very very small amount of the overall population so less than 10 percent

this happens because as technology improves and the government starts to invest in areas like higher education uh

we've got lots of very high skilled people and therefore we can get research and development and a quaternary sector

actually occurs this really only happens in the post-industrial era so this is what it looks like overall as

we can see primary goes down over time tertiary goes up secondary has a peak in the industrial period and then declines

and quaternary starts to appear in the post-industrial area and those are some basic reasons and why this changes as a

country develops over time