The Role of Employment in Promoting the Millennium Development Goals

Preface The present paper attempts to identify multiple pathways through which an employment-focussed development strategy can contribute towards speedier achievement of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In view of the importance of employment as a route out of poverty, the author explores the analytics of these pathways, theorising appropriate employment strategies as part of overall strategies for achieving individual MDGs, based on supporting evidence and trends from various countries. The significance of employment in the context of poverty reduction is acknowledged given that escaping poverty for much of the world's poor would mean raising the quantity and quality of their employment – either in the wage sector or in self-employed activities. Given this, the author distinguishes two broad categories of proximate causes of poverty: underemployment and low returns to labour. He argues that the nature of the growth process must be such that the forces creating underemployment and low returns to labour are weakened and in order to achieve this, raising the rate of growth ('growth factor') alone is not sufficient. Accompanying this should be efforts to make the growth process more labour demanding (raising the 'elasticity factor') and to remove the impediments the poor people often face in taking advantage of employment opportunities (improving the 'integrability' factor). Based on recent empirical evidence, the author attempts to explain the relationship between growth and poverty in select Asian countries using this framework of 3 underlying factors mentioned above (growth, elasticity and integrability). Following this, the paper then assesses the importance of gender-sensitivity in the context of a whole range of MDGs in which women and children occupy a central place-removing gender discrimination, improving maternal health, ensuring universal access to primary education, reducing child mortality, and combating HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. A central argument of the paper is that empowering women and improving their status vis-à-vis men within and outside the household is of critical importance for achieving all these goals. The author purports that a gender-sensitive employment strategy can play a significant catalytic role here by contributing towards the empowerment of women. Analysis presented here calls for extension of future research in this area in at least two directions. First, since many of the linkages between employment and MDGs suggested in this paper are in the nature of tentative hypotheses, it is apparent that a good deal of empirical research is required to assess the validity and strength of …