land, while the bulk of the land is held by the top 25% of the households. Next to starvation, unemployment is the ultimate measure of poverty in societies without the welfare and social support mechanisms of developed countries. Traditional concepts of what is employed or unemployed have rarely had much meaning in rural or urban Asia where kinship bonds, much underemployment and seasonal nature of agriculture are common in rural areas, and concepts of the duration of working day or week are poorly defined in urban areas. Official surveys often underplay the extent of unemployment. For example, in rural India in the early 1990's, the number of people wholly unemployed stood at 6% of the potential adult male labor force; but if underemployment is taken into account, the figure is 23%. Whatever the correct percentage, the fact is clear that a large proportion of the population is not able to contribute to national growth. Their numbers are probably higher in the urban areas than in rural areas, higher for the young than for the old, and they tend to increase with educational level and for men as compared with women."5
1.3. "All of the countries of Asia and the Pacific, except Japan, Singapore, Hongkong, Australia and New Zealand, are classified by the World Bank as low or middle-income countries. (Low-income countries are those with a 1993 GNP per head of less than US $ 695; middle-income countries are those with a 1993
5 Williams, p. 12.
