Comment mesurer l'emploi dans les pays en développement ?

The measurement of employment and unemployment is still subject to an intense debate because dissociating, in practice, the unemployed from those out of the labour force or determining who is adequately employed or not proves to be a very difficult conceptual and empirical exercise. These problems arise with particular acuity in the developing countries where the labor markets are characterised by an enormous heterogeneity of the situations the working-age population has to face. This article shows that the functioning of the labor markets in these countries would be better understood if the bipolar conceptions of employment such as work/non-work, formal/informal or self-employment/wage-earning were given up. It also suggests the use of additional indicators which would produce measurements of employment which make sense for these economies.