The capacity to put the whole population to work: activation of women, older workers, youth and the excluded, so the economy runs on all of its people rather than some of them.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Employment & Labour Force Participation as it stands today.
The NBER declared the Great Recession over in June 2009, yet employment conditions in many areas remained depressed through 2009 and 2010. The gap between the official end of recession and continued weak employment helped sustain use of the employment-to-population ratio, rather than the unemployment rate alone, as a measure of how fully a population is put to work.