In this book, I expand on my previous work (with Rana Hasan) on unemployment and underemployment in developing Asia, Labor Markets in Asia: Issues and Perspectives (2006). Here, I reiterate and stress my view that while economists and social scientists in general have praised developing Asia's unmatched growth record since the mid-1960s, they may have missed the important point that the region is failing to provide employment to its huge and still-growing labor force. Sooner or later this problem will become policy makers' biggest headache. The attainment of full employment, understood amid the problems posed by structural change (or transformation), globalization, and fast technical progress, should be the ultimate goal of economic policy. Figure A reproduces the framework used in Labor Markets in Asia to understand and conceptualize full employment and the policies to achieve it. In this book, I move one step forward and analyze the policies to achieve full employment during fast structural change. I view my work as contributing to the concern among policy makers in the developing world that growth has to be inclusive, that is, that it has to provide equal opportunities. In my view, opportunities come through employment.

In early 2008, the International Labour Organization (ILO) announced that as a result of the expected global economic cooling following the turbulence in financial markets, world unemployment would increase.