Proposal for a New Indicator of the Economic Dimension of Sustainable Development: The Unproductive Employment Rate (UER)

The disparity in labour productivity between agriculture and non-agricultural sectors is a widespread and persistent phenomenon, and its effects are detrimental to all three pillars of sustainable development. Efforts to reduce this disparity require the establishment of a benchmark. Therefore, the paper proposes a new measure of the economic dimension of sustainable development—the unproductive employment rate (UER)—which could be included in Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8). ‘Decent work and economic growth’, under target 8.5 ‘Full and productive employment and decent work with equal pay’, as SDG indicator 8.5.3. Based on cross-sectoral differences in labour productivity, this indicator measures the percentage of employment in agriculture that would need to be transferred out of the agricultural sector to achieve a balance between value added per employee in agriculture and value added per employee in the industrial and service sectors. The examples presented use World Bank data from 1995 and 2019 and show that higher levels of development and prosperity help to reduce the share of employment in agriculture and lower the UER indicator. A widening labour productivity gap has been observed between rich, developed groups of countries and groups of poor and least developed countries.