Structural change and employment: an empirical exploration

Abstract

This paper is an empirical exploration into the nature of structural change in output and its relationship with employment in a handful of developing countries over the last two decades. It also explores the relationship of these changes in output and employment structures with change in labour use patterns across gender. Finally it seeks to relate changes in employment patterns and labour use across gender with extant levels of poverty. It argues that a key link between growth and poverty reduction is ‘relative surplusness’ of labour, particularly in agriculture. Countries where output growth has not resulted in significant declines in relative surplusness of labour have also seen much slower declines in poverty levels. It therefore suggests that maybe we need to take another look at the assumption that productivity driven per capita income growth will automatically take care of issues of ‘relative surplusness’ of labour. In terms of employment outcomes, both females and males have had to deal with adjusting to and living with increasing relative surplusness of labour. In some contexts, there has been some mobility as well for females in the employed workforce. But what seems unchanging, both across time and space, is that males seem consistently over-represented in sectors with the highest output per unit labour.