Beyondbrics: Want a job? Move to Panama

September 12, 2012 9:54 pm by Ron Buchanan

 With the $5.2bn expansion of the Panama Canal, a new metro and airports under construction, along with a raft of luxury hotels, Panama’s 3.5m population can hardly satisfy demands on the nation’s workforce.

And now it’s official. Panama is the number one hotspot for jobs in the Americas. The most recent survey by Manpower shows that Panama has a 26 per cent net trend towards job creation – the percentage of companies that aim to hire people in the fourth quarter subtracted by those who aim to lay off personnel.

Perhaps surprisingly for a country whose economy has accumulated many negative headlines in recent months, Brazilian companies also showed a strong – though diminished – tendency to hire in the fourth quarter.

Brazil’s net trend came in at 23 per cent to take second place in the survey. The others included Peru with 23 per cent, Colombia 19 per cent, Costa Rica 18, Mexico 17 and Guatemala 14 per cent.

Canada came in at 9 per cent, one point ahead of the United States.

But something appears to be going rather wrong in Argentina, where it won the wooden spoon with a net trend of a mere 3 per cent.

Companies in Panama have for several years complained about a serious shortage of skilled and professional labour.

The answer has been large-scale imports of expatriates. Some countries in Central America receive billions of dollars in remittances from their emigrants to the United States and Europe.

In Panama, the flow is in the opposite direction. Panama sends hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances sent overseas from its foreign legion of engineers, accountants and hoteliers.