The Politics and Economics of Global Employment: A Perspective from Latin America
Author(s)
Gomez-Buendia, Hernando
Abstract
The standard methodology for analyzing levels of employment, namely a comparison of trends affecting labor supply and demand, may lead to an understanding of the reported rate of unemployment in developed countries. The same methods fail, however, to comprehend a crucial problem in developing countries: the large volume of low-productivity underemployment, often in the informal sector of the economy. Many Latin American countries, in particular, have a very modern, but relatively small, high-productivity formal sector alongside a much larger urban informal sector. This essay, by a Colombian economist, relates Latin America’s dual structure of employment to the political and economic history of the region.
