Metric Ton per Worker Steel Productivity Comparisons

The Wales National Statistics website (StatsWales) has a data series for crude steel production in the United Kingdom (UK) versus the number of people employed in the iron and steel industry.  (Click here to see this data.)   The data shows that in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the UK had about a 125 metric ton (mt) per worker productivity, whereas by the mid-2010s, the productivity had increased to about 660 mt per worker.  To me this data shows amazing technological progress made by the UK in producing steel from 1970 to 2015.

The following table shows metric tons of steel produced per worker for the UK as well as for Brazil, China, the European Union (EU), Japan, and the United States.  (Links are provided to the data sources.)  One thing that stands out in this table is the relative low productivity of China and Brazil’s steel industry compared to the other countries and the EU.  The Wales data series discussed above shows that the UK reached China’s recent steel-making productivity by 1983 and Brazil’s current productivity by 1987.

country	metric tons (mt) produced	number of workers	mt/worker	data source links
brazil (2016)	33,300,000	111,509	299	click here
china (2015)	803,825,000	3,627,000	222	click here and here
eu (2016)	161,979,000	318,000	509	click here
japan (2016)	104,780,000	176,000	595	click here
uk (1978)	20,310,000	165,400	123	click here
uk (2014)	12,030,000	18,270	658	click here
usa (2015)	87,000,000	142,000	613	click here

Recently, China announced its intention of reducing the number of workers in their steel industry by 500,000.  (Click here and here to read about this).  Using the data in the table above, I computed that for China to obtain a UK 2014 productivity level (658 mt per worker), China would have had 1,220,772 steel workers in 2015 (803,825,000 mt/1,220,772 workers = 658 mt per worker).  This suggests China would need to reduce its steel worker number by about 2,400,000 (3,627,000 – 1,220,722 = 2,406,228) to obtain UK’s 2014 productivity, far greater than the announced number planned for reduction.