International Labour Organization

In October 2023 the 21 st International Conference of Labour Statisticians adopted a new set of statistical standards on the informal economy, incorporating new definitions on different concepts related to informality and identifying a wide indicator framework. The process to develop those standards placed a central focus on improving the range of gender relevant data on the topic, drawing strength from recently adopted standards from the 19 th and 20 th ICLS on different forms of work, labour underutilization and work relationships. Beginning in 2021 the ILO launched a project with a range of workstreams but with a key focus on ensuring that the new standards would be sufficiently engendered, and that measurement guidance would be generated to support their timely implementation. A major part of this work was the organisation of comprehensive pilot studies in Uganda and Peru, involving a mix of qualitative and quantitative testing methods and a dedicated test of the impact of proxy response. This paper describes the evolution of statistical standards since 2013, highlighting their incremental and interrelated nature, providing a new and transformed platform for labour statistics. The paper further describes the pilot studies completed in Uganda and Peru and key findings emerging on the measurement of informality and heavily related topics through the labour force survey.

Despite initial research about the biases and perceptions of large language models (LLMs), we lack evidence on how LLMs evaluate occupations, especially in comparison to human evaluators. In this paper, we present a systematic comparison of occupational evaluations by GPT-4 with those from an in-depth, high-quality and recent human respondents survey in the UK. Covering the full ISCO-08 occupational landscape, with 580 occupations and two distinct metrics (prestige and social value), our findings indicate that GPT-4 and human scores are highly correlated across all ISCO-08 major groups. At the same time, GPT-4 substantially under-or overestimates the occupational prestige and social value of many occupations, particularly for emerging digital and stigmatized or illicit occupations. Our analyses show both the potential and risk of using LLM-generated data for sociological and occupational research. We also discuss the policy implications of our findings for the integration of LLM tools into the world of work.

This paper critically reviews fiscal policy instruments-including active labor market policies, social protection measures, care policies, and tax reforms-focusing on their differentiated impacts on underrepresented groups and their potential to foster labor market inclusivity. Our review reveals that empirical studies often overemphasize the capacity of individual policies to mitigate inequalities, neglecting the complex interdependencies among various mechanisms and policies. Instead, we argue for a systematic approach to ensure equitable access to good jobs and address disparities across labor market groups. Although sector-specific training and reskilling are essential, their effects often take time to materialize, highlighting the necessity of complementary labor demand measures, such as public works schemes, and employment subsidies, to address immediate challenges and promote inclusive growth. Care policies remain central to improving female labor market participation by alleviating their unpaid care burdens. The review also identifies critical research gaps, including the need for longitudinal studies on long-term policy impacts, an exploration of regional disparities in labor market inequalities, and sector-specific effects of fiscal measures.

https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181241311992

This paper is concerned with the expansion or penetration of digital economic activity in developing country contexts, and what this may mean for economic or structural transformations for countries in the Global South. We ask what possibilities new jobs and forms of work in the digital economy—and in particular platform work—hold for the productive transformation of developing economies in ways that contribute to achieving the goals of human, inclusive, and sustainable development. What are the impacts on work and workers in this process? The question of whether a ‘digital transformation’ can spur development, and if so how, and to whose benefit, depends in large part on the nature of employment created and on whether labour can move to higher productivity sectors, raising incomes while strengthening state capacity to finance public goods and services, including social protection.

Introduction Teleworking is one of the most significant legacies of the pandemic. Great attention is now being paid to its effects on workers’ health. One of the arguments that emerged on this issue is that ‘working away from the office’ affects the time we spend with significant others. This calls into question all those processes that make relatives and colleagues important to our health, such as forms of mentoring and social support, but also conflicts, work interruptions or control over workers’ activities. So far, no study has evaluated the impact that teleworking has on these processes using data on personal networks. The Empty Office is the first study to use social network analysis to measure the impact that telework has on social relations and, in turn, workers’ health and well-being. Methods and analysis. The project draws on a total sample of 4400 participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany (n=1100 per country). The choice of these countries is due to their specificity and diversity in socioeconomic features, which make them particularly interesting for studying teleworking from a comparative point of view. The research is conceived as a sequential mixed-method design. First, quantitative data collection will administer an online questionnaire to gather information on telework modalities, health and well-being markers, and data on personal networks collected by a name generator. A qualitative module, administered one year later, will consist of in-depth interviews with a subsample (n=32) of teleworkers selected for delving narratively into the mechanisms identified with the quantitative analyses.

Focusing specifically on the gender–climate–health nexus, this Personal View builds on existing feminist works and analyses to discuss why intersectional approaches to climate policy and inclusive representation in climate decision making are crucial for achieving just and equitable solutions to address the impacts of climate change on human health and societies. This Personal View highlights how women, girls, and gender-diverse people often face disproportionate climate-related health impacts, particularly those who experience compounding and overlapping vulnerabilities due to current and former systems of oppression. We summarise the insufficient meaningful inclusion of gender, health, and their intersection in international climate governance. Despite the tendency to conflate gender equality with number-based representation, climate governance under the UNFCCC (1995–2023) remains dominated by men, with several countries projected to take over a decade to achieve gender parity in their Party delegations. Advancing gender-responsiveness in climate policy and implementation and promoting equitable participation in climate governance will not only improve the inclusivity and effectiveness of national strategies, but will also build more resilient, equitable, and healthier societies.

Care is fundamental to the functioning of households, societies, and economies, contributing to the well-being of individuals and the productivity of the workforce and the economy. Despite its critical role, care, provided mainly by women, has historically been marginalised in economic analysis. The COVID-19 pandemic brought care to the forefront of policy discussions. Today, there is momentum in recognising the value of care. However, challenges remain. The care economy is heterogeneous, including paid and unpaid care, diverse skills and multiple institutions that provide care. Critical political economy issues relate to how care is organised and provided, how it is measured and financed, and who has access to care. Feminist economists have long advocated for the inclusion of care in economic analysis and the understanding of power structures and labour market outcomes for women. In this context, this paper, based on the current literature and data, explores the political economy of valuing care from a development perspective, emphasising the importance of recognising care’s role in societies and economies. It highlights the unique characteristics of the care economy and delves into the historical evolution of economic thought on care, highlighting key classical, neo-classical, and feminist economist thinking that shaped the discourse around care in economics. It relates this to the current division of labour inside and outside the home, and its implications for labour market outcomes for women and the need to measure care work, both paid and unpaid. Finally, it highlights the job creation potential in the care economy and the positive externalities of investment in care emphasising its critical role in the political economy for driving structural transformation and economic and social development.

This paper investigates the association between family formation and the labour market trajectories of immigrants’ descendants over the life course. Using rich data from the Trajectories and Origins survey from France, we apply multilevel event history models to analyse the transitions in and out of employment for both men and women by parity. We account for unobserved co-determinants of childbearing and employment by applying a simultaneous-equations modelling. Our analysis shows that women’s professional careers are negatively associated with childbirth. There are differences across descendant groups. The female descendants of Turkish immigrants are more likely to exit employment and less likely to re-enter employment following childbirth than women from other groups. The negative impact of childbearing on employment is slightly overestimated among women due to unobserved selection effects. Among men, the descendants of European immigrants are less likely to exit employment after having a child than other descendant groups. The study demonstrates the negative effect of childbearing on women’s employment, which is pronounced for some minority groups suggesting the need for further policies to help women reconcile work with family life.

Informality is widespread globally, with many workers and enterprises lacking formal arrangements. Effective statistics on the informal economy are essential for policy development, improving working conditions, and promoting decent work. Over the past 30 years, the establishment of statistical standards on informality has helped countries better measure and understand the informal sector and informal employment. Recent revisions to these standards, driven by evolving statistical labour standards and growing national experience, have led to a new resolution on informal economy statistics. Adopted at the 21st ICLS in 2023, this resolution offers a comprehensive framework for defining and measuring informality. It introduces concepts such as informal productive activities, the informal economy, the informal market economy, and informal work, setting the structure and boundaries for informality statistics. By integrating the 19th ICLS resolution on work, employment, and labour underutilization and the 20th ICLS resolution on work relationships, including ICSE-18, the new standards align with previous resolutions, promoting coherence in labour statistics. The resolution includes improved definitions of the formal and informal sectors, household own-use production and community sector, and formal and informal employment, enhancing data quality and harmonization across countries. Overall, the 21st ICLS resolution significantly enhance countries’ capacity to produce harmonized, policy-relevant statistics on the informal economy, aiding efforts to formalize it.

Housing and care are key sites of social reproduction that shape and are shaped by the labour process. As a Theory into Practice contribution, this article proposes social reproduction as a corrective that can restore the ‘human’ to discussions on temporary labour migration, including the potential for agency. Traditionally, ‘housing’ and ‘care’ are treated as disparate objects of regulation, which are further fragmented by the process of policy making itself. The article proposes ideas, some reflected in the International Labour Organization (ILO’s) recommendations, to turn aspirational values into lived realities to improve the historical disadvantages faced by temporary migrant workers. While it is widely accepted that this is necessary, we should remain hopeful that it is also achievable.

This article reports on the measurement properties of the Vietnamese versions of the Career Education and Development Scale‐Senior and the Career Education and Development Scale‐Tertiary. The International Labour Organization Vietnam facilitated collection of data from students in high schools ( N = 1463) and universities ( N = 645) who completed these new measures along with comparator measures of self‐efficacy and career‐related beliefs, and expectations. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed an eight‐factor model equivalent for high school and university students. Correlations with comparator measures provide evidence of concurrent validity. These new measures of career preparedness support Vietnam's national efforts to advance career development, research, and practice. Future research recommendations focus on testing the measures’ properties across different sociocultural factors and gender.

Promoting youth employment has become a crucial priority for policymakers worldwide, particularly in developing countries where governments seek to provide opportunities for a youthful population and take advantage of the well-recognized ‘demographic dividend’, which is critical for accelerating growth and prosperity. However, young people continue to experience much higher unemployment rates, usually around three times higher than for older adults, and are much more vulnerable to increases in unemployment during crises as witnessed in recent years. More concerning is that crises can have long-term effects for young people in their chances of finding decent employment. A more comprehensive perspective on the situation facing young people in labour markets is provided by looking at other indicators, including the share of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET rate), which went up during the COVID-19 crisis. In terms of employment quality, more than three out of four of the world’s young workers are informally employed with young people also overrepresented in working poverty and less-protected forms of work. Against this backdrop, this chapter presents the latest global and regional trends across key labour market indicators that highlight both progress and challenges for young people, with a specific focus on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on youth employment. An important finding is the divergence between low- and high-income countries. The chapter then explores policy responses, including the latest evidence on the effectiveness of active labour market programmes, before highlighting the different dimensions needed to adequately address youth employment challenges, especially in developing countries.