Wednesday 11 February 2015, 2.30-4.00pm
Venue: 3.28, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch
Quality of Employment in Developing Countries
Over recent years we have seen increased efforts to define and measure the quality of employment (and similar concepts such as job quality). Overall, these efforts have been much more successful in Europe than in other regions of the world, such as Latin America.
In developing countries, data availability on employment conditions is still very limited. However, monitoring the quality of employment is extremely important, as employment conditions do not always improve during periods of economic growth but instead respond more to external than internal factors.
In developing countries, employment conditions also form the foundation of social welfare systems. And poor quality jobs negatively impact productivity as workers cannot improve their skills. Although this relationship is less studied, we can be certain that precarious employment constitutes a drag on economic growth in developing countries.
Since policymakers ignore phenomena that are not measured, appropriate data and methodologies must be developed to establish indicators of the quality of employment. A comparison between the success and impact of the Human Development Indicators versus the relative lack of impact of the Decent Work approach serves to illustrate the need for systematic and synthetic measurement of the quality of employment.
In this context, the European example serves as a model for other regions of the world and helps us illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of different methodologies for the measurement of the quality of employment.
About the speaker:
Kirsten Sehnbruch is Professor of Public Policy and the Director of the Centre for New Development Thinking at the Department of Economics, University of Chile. She is also Director of International Relations at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion based at the same faculty. Before this, she was a lecturer and Senior Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her research focuses on Latin American labour markets and social policy, development policy and Chilean politics, and has been published by The Cambridge Journal of Economics, Development and Change, and the International Labour Review. She is the author of the book The Chilean Labor Market: A Key to Understanding Latin American Labor Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and with Peter Siavelis, editor of Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990-2010 (Lynne Rienner, 2014).
She is currently working on a new book on The Quality of Employment: Concepts, Measurement and Evidence from Developed and Developing Countries.