The aim of this thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of the labour market in informal-dominated developing economies. Mali is its study case. In the first part, it highlights the difficulty to approach unemployment through the ambiguous status of the informal workers, swinging between employment and unemployment. We show that the informal economy exacerbates the instability of the unemployment frontiers without alienating the wage stickiness, which we apprehend through a wage curve. The second part of the thesis presents the employment measures and shows that though, on one hand, they respond accurately to the labour market needs and aim to correct its shortcomings - particularly regarding the financing and training -, on the other hand, their execution is deeply dysfunctional. That explains the mitigated results of some measures, in implementation for over two decades. In the third part, the attention is turned to the labour supply, the weak knowledge of which can partially explain the failures of the employment policies. We examine the role of the household environment in the participation decision and the job search and shows that many variables of this environment can contribute to improving the measures.
