Just how good is unemployment as a measure of welfare? A note

Emmanuel de Dios () and Katrina Dinglasan
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Katrina Dinglasan: University of the Philippines School of Economics

Philippine Review of Economics, 2015, vol. 52, issue 2, 234-245

Abstract: Governments are rightly concerned with employment generation to make growth inclusive. The use of the open unemployment rate to measure success, however, may be misplaced. In a developing country like the Philippines, with a large informal sector and in the absence of unemployment insurance, open unemployment is primarily a middle-class phenomenon: the unemployed are not predominantly poor, and the poor are not predominantly unemployed. Measures of productivity and shifts of labor across sectors may contain more information and be more welfare-relevant

Keywords: unemployment; underemployment; labor force; welfare; poverty; development economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 J21 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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