Are the Unemployed Part of the Urban Poverty Problem in Latin America?

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Abstract
For a long period, the consensus in development studies argued that the unemployed in urban areas were not part of the poverty problem. It was argued in the 1970s that open unemployment in developing countries was not, in general, a serious social problem. This was not because rates of open unemployment were low in urban areas – Turnham cited open unemployment rates in urban areas of over ten per cent for countries as diverse as Ghana, Guyana, Panama, Puerto Rico, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Korea and the Philippines. Rather, it was argued that the unemployed were not poor. They were predominantly the relatively well-educated young, who were waiting to find good jobs, or migrants ‘queuing’ for work in the formal sector, or people temporarily out of work as they moved from one job to another. The urban informal sector or agriculture would provide jobs for those really needing work. Therefore, the ‘needy’ would not remain in open unemployment for long. Long periods of open unemployment would be luxury, available only to the better-off.