Chile proposes the world's first quality of employment index

The government of Chile has presented the world’s first quality of employment index in conjunction with British Academy Global Professor and LSE Distinguished Policy Fellow Kirsten Sehnbruch on 09 March 2020. This is the first time a government is proposing to use a synthetic measure of employment quality in a way that will inform policy makers. 

The index was developed by Professor Sehnbruch and her academic team for use in Latin America. It uses the dimensions income, employment stability and working conditions to inform policy makers about the state of their country’s labour market. This data will complement traditional variables used by governments to monitor labour markets, such as wages, participation and unemployment rates. These variables alone are not always good indicators of labour market performance, especially in developing countries with large informal sectors.

This ground-breaking tool will use detailed data available from household and labour force surveys in Chile to identify clearly the most vulnerable workers and other groups of workers in the labour force.

This data will also allow for the analysis of inequalities between groups of workers such as men and women, age groups, regions, migrants or ethnic minorities. Such distributional differences are an important consideration in developing countries where the composition of labour markets is much more diverse and where the differences between groups can be considerable.

(Content Courtesy: http://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2020/c-March-20/Chilean-government-first-in-world-to-propose-a-quality-of-employment-index)