Employment as a Development Strategy in a Changing World

The paper analyzes employment as a development strategy. Nowadays employment is involved in transformation processes, and it is experiencing contrasting processes like heterogeneity and convergence linked to globalization. This paper is structured as follows. The first paragraph investigates the current state of work in reference to the heterogeneity factors identified in this study. In the advanced countries heterogeneity processes reshape employment, forming labour market “castes” of insiders and outsiders i.e., workers who get respectively higher and lower guarantees in labour relations. In the developing countries heterogeneity has been affecting for a long time the economic structure, which used to be and still is based on a large informal economy sector. The second paragraph is dedicated to the work related convergence factors between advanced and developing countries. Unemployment is for instance. a problem affecting all of them. Another relevant convergence factor is the coming technological innovation. The third paragraph is dedicated to labour market policies. They promote the adoption of work related international measures and the implementation of a set of social protection measures in both the North and the South of the world. This type of measures lead to a common pattern, which is required by globalization. In so doing, labour market policies act as a development strategy. They carry out a common pattern at the global level and push both advanced and developing countries towards an increasing standardization in organizing and managing employment in the next decades.