There’s a lot of interest in an ‘employment goal’ as part of the post-2015 agenda. That makes sense. Ask people what they’re most concerned about worldwide and it is jobs and the economy. Ask politicians what they’re most concerned about and employment will come high up the list.
So what measure would we use? We can’t use ‘reduced unemployment’ as the goal, because it doesn’t really capture the full scale of the problem. The great majority of working age people are ‘employed’ worldwide, because if they weren’t doing something to earn money or grow food they’d be reduced to begging to survive –in most countries there just isn’t much in the way of a safety net to support them.
Read more at Global Development: Views from the Centre