ABSTRACT
The book has taken us through a large body of labor marker data on different aspects of wages and employment during the period of African decline in the twenty five years between the early seventies and the mid nineties. The self-employed predominate in the laborforce of sub-Saharan Africa. This is the principal mode of employment in farming, in off-farm employment and in the urban informal sector. Wage employees constitute a small part of the total workforce, and, apart from a very limited presence as casual labor or as employees in micro-enterprises, belong to the formal sector of these economies. The average for a number of economies of SSA reported in Table 1.8 is 12 percent for the early nineties, though the proportion could be quite high in a few countries. The formal sector, however, exerts a disproportionate influence on the course of the African economies, partly because its share of GDP and more so its share of the monetized part of the GDP is much greater than its share of employment, and secondly, because the impulses and signals emanating from this sector are often the determining factors in the trends in the rest of the economy.
