IT jobs will be slow to recover - OECD

Employment in the information and communications technology manufacturing industry in developed countries fell 6-7 per cent in the year to June, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

About five million people are now employed in information and communications technology (ICT) manufacturing. However, there was no drop in the 10 million jobs available to ICT services staff, who make up 3 to 4 per cent of all employees in the OECD.

The OECD believes that, based on past trends, the industry may be slower than most to pull out of the recession.

"During the last recession, employment reached a peak in 2000-01, bottomed out in 2003-04 and only started growing again in 2005, considerably later than the pickup in production."

The decline in ICT manufacturing in the United States hit employment by 10 per cent in the year to September 2009; employment in the ICT services sector also fell by 2 per cent. In the OECD as a whole, services employment was flat, or up 1 per cent.

Most developed countries, including New Zealand, have not altered their spending on e-government initiatives during the economic downturn, according to another OECD report on the effect of the crisis.

The New Zealand Government was also in the majority in telling the OECD that it regarded investment in e-government as part of its response to harder times.

Germany appears to have been the most aggressive, allocating 4 billion for a "multi-year crisis spending package" in February, including 500m that will be spent by the federal chief information officer on modernising Germany's administration.

It has established an open source software competence centre to support the wider use of open source software within the public sector and has launched a "green IT" initiative to try to reduce energy consumption in the public sector by 40 per cent by 2013.

The United States, Japan, Holland and Switzerland also upped spending on e-government initiatives this year, the OECD says. Britain, Austria, Hungary and hard-hit Iceland cut spending. Iceland's e-government budget fell 16.5 per cent this year and it is expected to drop another 18 per cent next year.