ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a global view of the development of employment following the analysis of the occupations structure of 1950. It provides a more in-depth analysis of the two most significant modernizing processes, namely: agricultural changes and the rise of an industrial manufacturing sector. The chapter also offers a global view of the labor market, taking into account both its supply and demand and starting from the moment when the main modernizing tendencies in this area of exchange began to materialize. It focuses on the main economic aspects of the modernization process in Central America. Agrarian activities naturally centered on the new export products, among which cotton, sugar, and beef were the most prominent. The importance of these activities was not only the result of the power of the bourgeois fractions associated with the same but the fact that they also "represented a logical response to capitalist modernization on the part of the State.
