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The concept has its origin in American sociology where it designates the parallel system of workers organizations and wage negotiations which developed alongside employers or workers unions in industrialized countries. In developing countries, it applies to a wide-range of activities not covered by classical socio-economic indicators, resulting from the implementation of development policies based on production and import consumption models in developed countries. In Africa, in particular, the analysis of national development plans from independence till the end of the 1960s has shown that employment itself was not considered as an objective. Owing to the severe shortage of skilled manpower and executives during that time, it was believed that the public service and the new industries could automatically absorb all the graduates from the training centers, universities and the labour force from the agricultural sector. However, the development policies applied aimed firstly at increasing the productivity of the cash-crop farming sector and the supply of cheap industrial labour with a view to an accelerated accumulation of capital. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 1970s, the economic growth, though rapid, appears to be accompanied by employment stagnation in the modern sectors of the African economies. It was, therefore, noticed that the rural exodus accelerated by the agricultural policies applied was partly responsible for transforming the rural unemployed people into urban unemployed people, whom the industries could not absorb. |
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