ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an understanding of the urban employment situation. The waste of productive human resources resulting from unemployment and underemployment is one of the most serious problems facing third world countries. Every development intervention has some influence on employment. While some have only short term effects during project implementation, such as the hiring of construction workers for housing and transportation projects, others have long term impacts. The understanding gained from the analysis may provide a means of evaluating the employment impacts of proposed projects. Potential for employment generation can be used as an additional consideration for evaluating alternative development interventions. Censuses are often the most readily available and comprehensive source of data on urban employment. Interventions designed to generate urban employment often focus on small scale enterprises and the urban informal sector because they are usually labor intensive and have relatively high employment multipliers.
