Nomaan Majid
Nomaan Majid is a senior development economist at the Employment Policy Department of the International Labour Office in Geneva, Switzerland. He has worked at the ILO since 1995, first as an economist in New Delhi and then in Geneva. His research interests are in the subjects of employment, labour markets, income distribution and poverty, particularly in developing countries. He has published papers in these fields. He was educated in Pakistan and in England.
Papers Published in World Economics:
The Changing Quality of Employment and the Sequencing of Reforms in China
The paper charts the process through which employment has been transformed in China. Measures of employment quality captured by estimates of regular and non-regular employment and unemployment are used to form a view of the changing employment situation. The increase in the share of regular employment in total employment, from 40.1% in 1990 to 62.7% in 2011, is staggering for the most populous country in the world. This is what lies behind the improvement in employment in China. This paper argues that factors behind the improvement in employment in China can be traced to sequenced policy shifts in sector growth strategies on one hand, and the gradual removal of effective constraints on the physical movement of labour on the other. In other words China has managed its process of structural change.
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Measuring Employment in Developing Countries
This paper is concerned with measuring categories of employment that have an economy-wide meaning in the developing world. Employment has always had two interconnected sides, output and income, and these two dimensions of employment operate under very different conditions in advanced and developing economies. A developing economy is divided into two parts, organised and unorganised in respect of labour. A large amount of surplus labour exists in the unorganised part creating underemployment that manifests itself in a range of forms of employed labour. In this situation the headcount of the employed overestimates economy-wide employment; and the headcount of the unemployed seriously underestimates economy-wide unemployment.
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