During the last decades of the last century, the principal objective of employment policies was to reduce high and persistent unemployment. Subsequently, these policies were reoriented towards improving the quality of the employment generated. Because of the 2008 international financial crisis, the unemployment rates increased rapidly, so the political objective focused once again on reducing unemployment and generating employment, adding the perspective of employment quality or decent work. This chapter studies the evolution of employment policies objectives and measures, and their impact on economic development, through the labor market. The first section contains a classification of employment policies, according to how they act to anticipate unemployment in the labor market on the supply side, the demand side, or both; and how they act to reduce the lack of income due to the loss of employment, i.e., compensatory policies. The second section compiles a theoretical review of the effects of these different employment policies on the labor market. The following sections show the evolution of the different objectives and measures of employment policies during the Great Recession. In the conclusions, we link employment policies with the Sustainable Development Goals that are to be achieve by 2030.