Employment, growth and basic needs: A one-world problem
Commonwealth heads of government at the Ohawa meeting in 1973 endorsed the decision taken in Lusaka in January 1973 by ministers concerned with youth matters to establish a Commonwealth Youth Programme.
Whileoutliningthepurposeandestablishing priorities, heads of government identified as one of the major objectives “to seek to eliminate unemployment and to alleviate its ill-effects”. Policy-oriented, inter-disciplinary research in the field of employment was strongly supported as a priority area by Regional Planning meetings and by the Commonwealth Youth Affairs Council meetings in New Delhi (1973), Nairobi (1975) and in Malta (1976). Thus, one of the major concerns of the Programme has been directed towards youth unemployment and alleviating its ill-effects.
There are specific elements of the problem which affect young people in particular, yet the problem of youth unemployment cannot be considered without also taking into account the overall problem of unemployment and its bearing on the optimum use of human resources. And the problem of unemployment should be examined within the context of the wider issues of poverty and under-development.
Why do so many of us these days – planners, politicians, economists – give so much importance to the employment problem? Why has the Ministry of Youth launched a third Youth Policy, and why was there a Youth Connekt Africa Summit in Rwanda’s capital Kigali recently? Steps leading to this heightened emphasis on employment these days form a clear, logistical sequence, and can be briefly outlined.
Let us start by asking ourselves: What is the purpose of development? In the 1950’s or 1960’s, the answer given would have been to increase the GNP – the gross national product - the sum total of goods and services. Since then, there has been a process of “dethronement of GNP”. We now would say that the purpose of development is to reduce and finally eliminate poverty.
This is not to say that those who emphasised the growth of GNP in earlier days were not aware of the poverty problem, nor were they necessarily insensitive to it. But there was a tendency to assume rather unquestioningly that if the total care increased, everybody would have more, or in other words that an increase in GNP would “trickle down” to the poorest sections. For many reasons, not least the facts of life as they can be seen, we are now no longer willing to make that optimistic assumption.
But if the purpose of development is to reduce poverty, we must, of course, first define poverty and then measure it – at least in the sense of knowing who are the main groups experiencing poverty and should be targets of the main development policy.
In defining poverty, we must set up a minimum standard of basic needs which must be satisfied before we can declare a household to be beyond poverty.
This standard could be defined in terms of a minimum supply of food, shelter, clothing, access to health services, to education, to clean water, etc. Alternatively, it could be defined in terms of money also. When a minimum needs standard or poverty line is defined, it is usually found that a very high proportion of the total population is below the poverty line; and the proportion of women, young people and children below the poverty line is invariably disproportionately greater than the number of men.
The number of young school-leavers below the poverty line is high because many of them have not found productive employment.
It is also found that the number or even the proportion of people below the poverty line in many countries tends to increase, even when the GNP is rising sharply. This is one of the “facts of life” mentioned earlier, which leads us to doubt the “trickle down” theory of GNP growth. It is, therefore, natural to conclude that the provision of productive employment should be the main instrument of reducing poverty, and hence the main tool for economic development. The provision of productive employment sufficient to yield an income above the poverty line is not an easy task.
There are many forces obstructing such a policy.
One of the most potent of such obstacles is the monopoly of technological know-how by the richer countries, which is imported into the developing countries.
While this technology suits the conditions of the industrial countries – plenty of capital and high-level skills and relatively little unskilled labour – it does not suit the developing countries with their different problems and very different resources endowments. When capital-intensive technology is introduced in the developing countries, it creates what economists call a “dualistic” economy – a relatively small sector with a technology similar to that of the industrial countries and with high labour productivity, with the rest of the economy left high and dry to try to make a living with practically no access to capital.
The latter sector, the so-called “informal sector”, is often treated as a marginal sector outside the economy as a whole, while in fact it is a victim of mistaken development policies not properly geared to the reduction of poverty as a primary objective.
If the reduction of poverty is a primary objective, it is essential that the import of technology should be on a much more selected basis. This will require changes not only in the policy of the developing countries, but also in the international system governing the transfer of technology.
It will also be necessary for developing countries to acquire much greater powers of imported technology as well as the creation of appropriate new technology.
The application of modern scientific and technical know-now should be particularly focused on the improvement of the living standards and income-earning opportunities of the rival and the urban poor.
Efficient technological alternatives exist, and the range of technological choices can be widened by the use of equipment, the adaptation of existing machinery and processes, the revival of obsolete techniques, and the local manufacture of equipment. The emphasis is on the use of appropriate technology.
The conclusion, therefore, must be that just as employment policy is the bulk of development policy but not the whole of it, so the technology problem is the bulk but not the whole of employment policy. It is, therefore, right that it must be one of the main but not the only subject for discussions.
If we can bring progress in this field by improved arrangements in the creation, transfer and dissemination of appropriate technology, this will be a big step towards the improvement of the employment situation and the Economic Order.
Obviously, a sensitive issue, and must be one of the centres of debates.