...how do you define "seek a job" in a place where the concept of full-time employment is alien?
Therein lies the rub. If you dig into the stats, the 10% unemployment rate quoted in official government statistics - and measured accordingly to the methodology economists usually use, excluding people who have "given up on searching for a job - is based on a definition of "job" where they have worked (in cash or in kind) for at least one hour in the past week. By those stats, 50% of the country was not in the labor force, 45% was "employed" (for at least one hour a week), 5% was actively unemployed.
But then when you dig further, 75% of those classified as "employed" didn't receive any payment for their work. They bartered. So now we're looking at 12.5% employment. And 84% of those employed worked in the informal sector, i.e. maybe they did a couple hours of labor for another villager. Considering the large overlap between the bartering & informal sectors, we're at around 5% full-time employment in the country.
That shows the difficulty in applying models built for an industrial economy to regions that still primarily function on an agrarian economy. The definitions they use are nonsensical - they don't apply to how people qualitatively work. (There're similar difficulties applying models made for industrial economies to post-industrial economies - how do you classify someone who drives for Uber & Lyft at the same time while AirBnBing out their house, doing Instacart runs, running an Amazon import-export business over the Internet, trading in Bitcoin, and selling stuff on Etsy? Is that 0, 1, or 7 jobs? Are they a financier or taxicab driver?)
