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The chapter gives a global overview of recent labour market developments and short- and medium-term projections for employment and wages. The chapter discusses recent changes in occupational employment and how they affect inequality and wages. The chapter also highlights the importance of rising youth unemployment for social unrest across major world regions.

The chapter analyses factors influencing medium-term employment growth, highlighting the importance of labour force participation, occupational changes and income inequality as key determinants. The chapter also discusses the role of manufacturing employment for overall job creation and challenges that the early decline in manufacturing employment in a series of emerging economies poses for their future economic and social development.

This article argues that at least two distinct categories within the informal sector - informal services and informal manufacturing - exhibit different structural and behavioural characteristics. While some segments of informal manufacturing may indeed be 'dynamic' as noted by some recent studies, the hypothesis is tested for the informal service employment on the basis of a survey by the author in New Delhi, India. It examines investment, earnings, returns to human capital, socio economic characteristics and scope for upward mobility of informal service employment. It finds formal education does not explain differences in earnings in the sample but background characteristics do; earnings in the informal service sector are neither the lowest in the economy nor are they comparable to wages in the urban formal unskilled sector, when differences between migrants and non-migrants are taken into account. On the basis of these results, the paper reflects on the nature of growth and structural change in the Indi...