Impact of Airbus in Toulouse employment

Some days ago, I attended for the first time a meeting of Rosemasters club in Toulouse. We were about 20 people attending. During the introduction round we discovered that there were 5 Airbus employees among us, which was 25% of us (plus 2 former employees). This could be expected given the importance of Airbus in the city of Toulouse… but, how important is it really?

I had read in some studies about the impact of air transport and aerospace industries in the economy of a given region; taking into account direct employment, indirect and induced. You may take a look at the report “The National Economic Impact of Civil Aviation” [PDF, 1.5MB] prepared by DRI•WEFA, to see some multipliers (Table 1 in page 8).

In the study, we can see that in the case of the USA, for every aerospace job there are 1.9 indirect jobs created and 1.5 induced jobs; thus one aerospace job creates 3.4 jobs.

If we use the same figures for the case of Toulouse:

• Airbus and  EADS employ over 21,000 people here;
• there would be another 41,000 indirect (employment generated in the businesses that supply goods and services to the aerospace sector) and
• 32,000 induced jobs (employment in other sectors generated thanks to the income spent by direct and indirect aerospace-related employees) thanks to the activity of EADS in the region, in total ~73,000 extra jobs.

These together with the 21,000 jobs from EADS make up for a total of ~94,000 jobs.

Toulouse is a city of ~440,000 inhabitants, with 1.1 million living in the metropolitan area: ~9% of the population of the metropolitan area has a job created directly or indirectly thanks to EADS activity… if we talk about families, between 25-30% of the families depend on a job created directly or indirectly thanks to EADS activity.

No doubt, aerospace is a strategic sector for the region.