Unemployment – underemployment
Gerhard Bosch
Chapter 11 in The Elgar Companion to Decent Work and the Sustainable Development Goals, 2025, pp 139-151 from Edward Elgar Publishing
Abstract:
The usual indicator of the extent of underemployment is the unemployment rate. Underemployment, however, is like an iceberg, of which only the part visible above water is measured by the unemployment rate. In recent decades, criticism of the traditional concepts of measuring unemployment has increased. This is no coincidence! Especially in the less developed countries with their high shares of informal employment, unemployment rates have little meaning. In these countries, few underemployed people are eligible for unemployment benefits and thus have an opportunity and incentive to register as unemployed. There is now widespread agreement that there is no “one right indicator” to capture the different forms of underemployment in the labour market, but that one needs several indicators. It is shown that the ILO’s goal of developing a globally comparable system of indicators in its decent work agenda an only be achieved to a limited extent due to the different significance of the same statistical indicators in developed and less developed countries.
Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Sociology and Social Policy; Sustainable Development Goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035300907.00017 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21934_11
Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com
Access Statistics for this chapter
More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().