Effect Of Unemployment And Under-Employment In Developing Countries

Unemployment and under-employment in developing countries are most acute in the area outside a few metropolitan cities; so there is a mass migration into these cities in a desperate search for a livelihood: and the cities themselves, in spite of economic growth, become infested with ever-growing multitude of destitute people. Any visitor who has ventured outside the opulent districts of these cities has seen their shanty town and belts of misery, which are often growing ten times as fast as the cities themselves.

Current forecast of the growth of metropolitan area in india, and many other developing countries, conjure up a picture of town with 20, 40 and even 60 million people a prospect of ‘immigration’ for a roofless and jobless mass of humanity, that beggars the imagination.

No amount of brave statistic of national income growth can hide the fact that all too many developing countries are suffering from the twin diseases of growing unemployment and mushrooming metropolitan slums, which are placing their social and political fabric under an intolerable strain. The suspicious has been voiced (and cannot be dismissed out of hand) that foreign aid, as currently practiced, may actually be intensifying these twin diseases instead of mitigating them; that the heedless rush into modernization extinguishes old jobs faster than it can create new ones; and that all the apparent increases in national income are eaten up, or even more than eaten up, by crushing economic burden produce by excessive urban growth. It is rather obvious that a man’s cost of subsistence-something-very different from his standard of life rises significantly the moment he moves from a small town  or rural area into big city.