Introduction

1.1. Objectives and Scope of the Study

A nation's economy has been described as a huge machine that devours natural resources, labor, and capital and turns out the multitude of goods and services that make up the gross national product. But the economy is not an inanimate contraption of steel and concrete; it is primarily an organization of human beings, and it has some attributes of a living organism. It can grow and expand its capacity to consume inputs and produce outputs; and, like a tree, how well it grows depends very much on the environment in which it is planted. For the growth of the economy, while the wealth of the natural environment is relevant, it is the human environment that is crucial. The social and political institutions, the scales of values, and above all the qualities of the people are primary ingredients of the soil and atmosphere in which economic growth will flourish or languish.

The labor force plays a central role in the growth of the economy, directly as the supplier of the most important input into production, and indirectly as the dominant influence in the human environment. The qualities of this environment and the qualities of the labor input are inseparable. Many economists attribute more importance to these qualities than to any other cause of differences in the wealth of nations and their economic progress. Major importance is attached to the skills and aptitudes of the workers, their educational qualifications, the state of their health, their ambitions, their mobility, and their readiness to adopt new ideas and methods. The formation of such qualities is not exogenous to the economic system. It is fostered by the development of modern economic organization and nourished by consumption of the products, including not only such items as educational and medical services and essential food, clothing, and shelter, but also a wide range of other goods and services that may stretch the mind and whet the appetite for a better living.

Quantitative as well as qualitative aspects of development of the labor force are important: its growth in relation to the growth of population and capital and to the advance of technology; its composition in terms of sex, age groups, and other characteristics of workers; its deployment among industry sectors, occupation groups, and status categories (employees, employers, self-employed, and unpaid family workers); its distribution between rural and urban sectors and among regions of a country. The formation of qualities of the labor force cannot be independent of these variables, and all are linked in mutual relationships with the productivity and dynamism of the economy. Efforts to manage economic and human development demand knowledge of these relationships — a fund of knowledge that the social sciences have only begun to accumulate.

Within the wide field of research relevant to these questions, the present study focuses on some basic demographic dimensions of the labor force and their changes in the process of economic development. The dimensions considered are the relative size of the labor force in proportion to the population, and measures of participation in the labor force by males and females and various age groups. The labor force/population ratio is one factor in the level of output per head that the economy is capable of producing. The labor force participation rates (or activity rates, as they will be called for convenience) relate to the demographic composition of the labor force as an aspect of its qualitative development as well as to the organization of the society and the style of life. Factors that influence these dimensions of the labor force and their changes will be examined, and an attempt will be made to define typical patterns of their changes in countries undergoing economic development and demographic transition.

The study is based on a world-wide compilation of labor force and population statistics of censuses taken during the two decades 1946–1966. This provides measures of labor force dimensions for a hundred countries in varied economic, demographic, and cultural circumstances. Associations between economic development and labor force characteristics can be studied both in a cross-sectional view of differences between countries and a longitudinal analysis of changes during the intervals between censuses.

Thanks to the progress of census taking in less-developed countries since World War p, the data base for such a comparative international study is much broader now than it was in the past. Before the war, limitations of data confined research on labor force characteristics largely to developed countries. Although the historical statistics of some of these countries provided some view of their experience in less advanced stages of development, this view was obscured by the defects of labor force classifications in the early censuses and the discontinuity caused by changes in the classification systems from one census to the next. Progress since the war in modernizing census methods in less-developed countries, and the taking of censuses in many countries where this primary statistical source had been lacking, have opened a much wider and clearer view of labor force characteristics and changes under conditions of low income and little-developed technology and economic organization.

A path-breaking study undertaken during the 1950s by the United Nations Population Division, based on the data of early postwar censuses, produced a broad cross-sectional picture of patterns of participation in the labor force by sex-age groups of the population in countries at different levels of development. This was supplemented by the Collver-Langlois study of economic activities of the female population in metropolitan areas of countries around the world, which also ranks as a classic in this field. The present study goes farther along the paths marked out by those earlier studies, taking advantage of the wider coverage of countries and fuller classifications of labor force characteristics furnished by more recent censuses. Most important, a temporal dimension is added by the analysis of changes during the intervals between postwar censuses. The data from less-developed countries available to the authors of the earlier studies offered little scope for this.

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