rather even when the activities of the modern sector expand their employmentgenerating potential is often limited because technological choices and thereby capitallabour ratios are driven by global competition and thus largely determined exogenously one of the characteristics of this different type of structural change is the transfer of labour from lowproductivity agriculture to lowproductivity service activities in urban areas this entails a proliferation of lowproductivity employment in nontradable activities as workers move out of subsistence activities in agriculture even at relatively low levels of per capita income