This article shows how the recently refined theory and practice of shadow pricing is relevant in devising appropriate policies for meeting the recent concerns with poverty redressai and employment generation. It also demonstrates how the problems of employment and equity are related in a series of models where public policy is subject to an increasing number of political and structural constraints. It distinguishes between the long-run perspective planning problem in which the employment problem is manifested as the choice of the optimal growth rate for the economy, and short-run policy problems of dealing with various disequilibria and distortions which force the economy inside the constrained feasibility frontier, and for whose amelioration policies based on estimates of various shadow wage rates are shown to be crucial.