Blog Maldives

The rapid growth of the tourism industry left its mark on the labour market, which saw a dramatic shift away from agriculture and toward services. In part because of lack of training among the general population, a number of foreign workers from South Asia provide skills needed to help develop businesses. As businesses on resort islands away from the general populace demanded an increasing share of the total labour force, the participation rate of women, who are discouraged by the culture from living away from their families, fell substantially. About three-fifths of women participated in the labour force in the 1970s, but the rate dipped as low as one-fifth of women in the mid-1990s. By the 2010s, however, the participation rate had recovered to about half of women.

Industries are largely of the handicraft or cottage type, including the making of coir (coconut-husk fibre) and coir products, fish canning, and boatbuilding. Textile and garment manufacturing was among the more lucrative industries from the mid-1990s until the 2005 expiry of an import quota regime in international textile trade left factories in the Maldives unable to compete. Construction makes up the bulk of the industrial sector.

Fishing, long the traditional base of the economy, has been far surpassed by tourism as the main source of gross domestic product (GDP). While the sector still produces the bulk of the country’s exports and continues to grow (albeit at a slower pace than the tourism industry), it employs less than one-fifth of the labour force and contributes less than one-tenth of the GDP. Tuna is the predominant fish caught, traditionally by the pole-and-line method, although a good deal of the fishing fleet has been mechanized. Most of the fish catch is sold to foreign companies for processing and export.

More than half of the population is considered rural. With the exception of those living in Male, the only relatively large settlement in the country, the inhabitants of the Maldives live in villages on small islands in scattered atolls. Only about 20 of the islands have more than 1,000 inhabitants, and the southern islands are more densely populated than the northern ones. The birth rate for the Maldives is somewhat higher than the world average, but the death rate is lower. More than one-fifth of the total population is under 15 years of age. Life expectancy is about 74 years for men and 79 for women.

The Maldives, a vast island nation in the Indian Ocean, was blessed by the scuba diving gods.