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[Combating poverty and inequality] Towards employment-centred structural change
Bangura, Yusuf
Bangura, Yusuf
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Abstract
"A fundamental precondition for poverty reduction is a pattern of growth and structural change that generates productive employment, improves earnings and contributes to the welfare of the population. Employment policies must fi gure centrally in development strategies if such a pattern of growth is to occur. The 1995 World Summit for Social Development refocused the world’s attention on the centrality of employment in social development, committing governments “to promote full employment as a basic priority of economic and social policies, and to enable all men and women to attain secure and sustainable livelihoods through freely chosen productive employment and work”.1 Nevertheless, the dominant development policy approaches of the following decade, as refl ected, for example, in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), largely ignored employment. Even the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) subsume employment under the goal of halving extreme poverty and hunger. While inclusion in the MDGs of the target of “full and productive employment and decent work for all” is a timely acknowledgement of its importance, the strategies for achieving this target remain unclear. This chapter outlines elements of a framework for incorporating employment more centrally in development policy. It highlights the potential and limits of different growth paths in generating employment, and argues that economic growth or industrialization per se will not necessarily lead to sustained improvements in employment, income and well-being. The classic pattern of structural change found in today’s high-income countries, in which economic growth fuelled a shift from agriculture to industry and from industry to services, as well as a shift from self-employment to formal wage employment, is diffi cult to replicate in the context of open economies without deliberate policies. Labour still moves out of agriculture in the vast majority of countries, but it is absorbed into low-value services and the informal sector where the scope for sustained growth in productivity and incomes is limited. Poverty in most parts of the developing world is in large part accounted for by this pattern of structural change. The free-market orientation of development policy in the last few decades is associated with expanding labour market inequalities, persistent informalization and the emergence of precarious forms of employment in many countries. The free-market orientation of development policy is associated with labour market inequalities, persistent informalization and the emergence of precarious forms of employment"(pg 29)
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Book chapter
Date
2010
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9789290850762
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With permission of the license/copyright holder