tive, yet from the International Labour Office (Mayer) ‘no regional development
theory has been developed specifically with employment in mind’. Of course the
social sciences supply a range of modelling instruments. But the ILO view is that
‘employment specialists have in fact come up with very few analytical tools of
their own’. The end result is levels of unemployment largely aligned with the job
immobility of those on lower incomes and of lesser skill.
The corrections applied in OECD economies range from direct assistance for
economically depressed regions, through to the introduction of welfare and social
projects, right on down to almost nothing! The policy instruments put forward,
often from an attitude of faith rather than conviction, stress the need for good
forward and backward linkages, growth pole strategies, improvement of regio-
nal infrastructure, and employability-enskilling job-creation and starter-project
schemes, all of which (excepting most growth pole strategies) cannot be gainsaid.
Yet where are the ‘real’ jobs? Who might be the development or conservancy part-
ners? What might be the development and conservancy alternatives? What are
the potential regional cooperative venture initiatives?
Given that unemployment alleviation is the bottom line indicator of regional
progress what, subject-specifically, are the top-down employment policies (addi-
tional to project generation) which are relevant and applicable? Bairoch (1988)
invokes an implicit advantage in terms of the proportions employed in cities of
the 300,000 to one million size-scale, although as a policy emphasis this consti-
tutes little more than academic trivia for regional practitioners working in the
service of already larger cities. More practically, regional administrators can work
to strengthen forward and backward linkages, specifically between the rural
periphery and the urban heartland, and from settlement to settlement, and for
connecting development to conservancy projects.
There are some specific policies for priming and supporting enterprises which
generate employment inducing linkages. Small-enterprise development and con-
servancy projects tie in with a ‘mobilization’ reasoning where for Maillat (1988)
‘each job fulfils a function: it can provide stability, it can act as a springboard, or
it can offer flexibility’. Co-related reasoning, connecting into enterprise mobility,
invokes an emphasis on skill-portability rather than job-specific enskilling.
Another ILO official, Lothar Richter, lays emphasis on the role of ‘key informants’
advising a ‘recognition of the fact that there are many persons – business[people],
farmers, officials, teachers in every country who, by virtue of their
occupations, responsibilities and interests, possesses a wide
knowledge of manpower and employment patterns and trends’.
Comment on employment alleviation needs to include the
observation that within most OECD nations the traditional major
sources of employment in primary production industries, like
agriculture, have become streamlined and technologically refined- with considerable and permanent reductions in the numbers
employed within those sectors. Of course growth in tourism, neo-
technology service industries and agro-forestry will redress the
imbalance to some extent – but a visibly long-term, permanently
unemployed vector has become an established reality.
182 Practice
At the softer informal
scale the ‘green
economy’ approach
involves unemployed
people exchanging goods
and skills, possibly on a
‘green exchange dollar’
basis. More formally it
involves official
endorsement and some
cash input to low-cost
capitalization business
start-ups.