Employment Patterns, Poverty and Income Inequality

Abstract

The chapter looks at the impact of changing work patterns on poverty and income inequalities and discusses policy implications from the findings based on micro‐data from 40 countries. It finds that, on average, the standard form of employment is better remunerated than other types of work. Temporary and informal workers, part‐time workers and unpaid family workers, many of whom are women, are also disproportionately affected by poverty and social exclusion. Given the rise of non‐standard work forms and the increasing gap between the top and bottom, in many countries market income inequality has remained high or increased since the mid‐2000s. Despite this, some countries have been able to reduce poverty rates and disposable income inequality in the same time period, mainly by pursuing combinations of social protection and labour market policies.

Migration and Rural Sustainability: Relative Poverty Alleviation by Geographical Mobility in China

“…Relative poverty is determined by income, which depends on employment, and therefore employment is an important variable apart from migration. Employment can translate the dividends of economic growth into poverty reduction and income gap reduction and is arguably the most important form of an economic-altering channel [52,53], not only increasing per capita consumption but also significantly reducing the economic vulnerability of rural households [54,55]. Gábos et al (2015) cite the dynamic growth of employment in the country in general and the equitable distribution of employment growth across households as important determinants of poverty alleviation [56].…”

Domestic work, wages, and gender equality: Lessons from developing countries

“…A recent analysis based on 40 advanced and developing countries shows that women have lower average annual incomes than men: on average, women earned between 57 per cent (Switzerland) and 97 per cent (Philippines) of what men earned (Rani et al, 2015). The study showed that compared to the mid-2000s, the gender gap in the average annual incomes has decreased in almost all the countries under analysis by between one (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Italy, Slovakia) and eight (Lithuania, Luxembourg) percentage points.…”