Mesurer l'emploi, le chômage et le sous-emploi rural dans une économie en voie de développement

Employment and unemployment statistics belong to the most quoted and commented macroeconomic data. However, whereas the theoretical definition of unemployment is relatively well established and accepted, its measurement is still widely controversial because dissociating, in practice, the economically active occupied persons from the unemployed, and those who stay out of the labour force, proves to be a very difficult task. This article proposes to summarize some of the theoretical and practical challenges that employment statistic has to face and to illustrate them from a field work carried out in Peruvian rural areas. It is shown that because of a lack of epistemological thinking on the classification of persons, the existing employment statistics produced by national Peruvian institutes provide only a partial picture of the true labour utilization problem.