The Economy
of an Isle
Breeding in Balagne [Ph.
Desjobert]
Tourism and Economy
The economy of Corsica has been marked for a long time by agriculture and
breeding. It has nowadays a straw tertiary sector as a dominant: services
for private individuals and businesses. It is a little productive consumer
economy which is strongly dependent up on the foreign countries.
The mastery of transport and prices plays a primordial part in it. Tourism
is one of the first isle's industries, it reinforces the importance to
give to transport.
The tourists'number has actually been multiplied by four in twenty years..
Now population doubles during August and 60% of tourists come to visit
the isle between July and August. This seasonal character marks the tourist
industry, but also the activities which ensue it and the whole island
economy.
Despite the material's modernization and the expansion of services with
added value, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per inhabitant remains the
lowest of the metropolitan France. Its growth rate however follows the
national average. This low level of added value has two main reasons:
a proportion of one working to two non-working and a weak productivity.
Men and Employment
The Business [ whose is10% food ] and the merchant services [ Hotels, Health,
Telecom,..] share half of the total employment.
Agriculture, Industry and BTP provide, of equal parts, a quarter of it.
The non-merchant Services [ Administrations, State Education System, local
Commmities ] too.
The business, with a strong increase, is now the first merchant sector
of the isle.
Geographically it is unequally distributed and is almost absent from towns
under one hundred inhabitants.
The corsican agriculture present very varied types of exploitations.
On the one hand, a traditional agriculture based on the extensive breeding
moving to summer pastures in the inner isle and the arboriculture of the
olive tree and chestnut tree elsewhere, on the other hand big exploitations
of vegetal, fruit and wine-producing productions of the littoral, especially
on the eastern plain.
The Demographic Evolution
From an ancient tradition, emigration became massive from 1850. 
It began with the conscriptions, wars, overpopulation of the wealthy
micro-regions such as Castagniccia
or the Balagne, and with the agriculturals'
difficulties. Evolution of the population from 1801 to 1990 The joining
to a wealthy metropolis which was being in search of labour and tempted
with the colonial adventure, offered an opening.
When in 1900, the isle's population has reached its maximum, the young's
leaving has then created an imbalance in the death-birth natural balance
and also in the structure of workings.
In 50 years Corsica has lost more than the third of its population,
it went to 190 000 inhabitants in 1955.
Nowadays the few island's population is strongly marked by its structure
and its space distribution. The over 60s represent a quarter of the population
and the foreign workers with their family reach 10%.
The geography is compartmentalized. Almost half of the population is
concentrated in towns of Bastia
and Ajaccio, whereas the
inner isle is depopulated and it poses problems of territory's facilities
and of national and regional development.
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