Policies to Achieve Full, Productive, and Decent Employment in Asia

As argued in Chapter 1, governments across Asia must give maximum priority to promoting full, productive, and decent employment if they are to make a serious dent in the large-scale unemployment and underemployment that exists in Asia’s labor markets. What government policies and actions will promote such employment? In this final chapter, we focus on addressing this question. However, before we get to the specifics, it is useful to reiterate what we mean by full, productive, and decent employment. In a developing country context, where a large proportion of the labor force is underutilized, full employment is about reducing unemployment as well as reducing underemployment; it is about employment creation. Moreover, the employment that is created must be productive. Creating jobs without regard to their productivity, as may be attempted by governments for the sake of reducing unemployment, is at best a short-term solution. Finally, employment must be decent. This entails that employment provide workers with basic rights (such as the freedom of association, protection from forced or compulsory labor, and elimination of discrimination) and security. In what follows, we first discuss the policies and actions required for attaining full and productive employment. Those required for ensuring that employment is decent are provided after that.