This paper investigates the effects of demographic shifts on labor productivity by leveraging variation in the age structure of Italian regions. These effects are analyzed along a first channel – the direct relation between population age and productivity – and a second channel capturing the productivity implications of a more or less dispersed age distribution. We propose an estimation framework that relates regional productivity to the entire age distribution of the working-age population and use instrumental variable techniques to address endogeneity issues. The estimates yield a hump-shaped age-productivity profile peaking between 35 and 40 years. We also document non-linear effects of regional age dispersion on productivity.

This paper studies the process of labour market formation in the tourism industry in Spain. Results show that tourism regions diverged in their capacity to attract local labour, a factor that led to different compositions of the workforce. In the most dynamic regions, circular migration became a key factor as a result of housing shortages, seasonality and labour policy. Tourism agents promoted these flows by different mechanisms such as recruitment at origin and temporary accommodation. Migration benefited growth of firms, natives' upward mobility and migrants' accumulation of capital. However, inequality in the regional labour market and host society increased.

This study investigates the impact of the massive and unexpected influx of Syrian refugees on the job vacancy rates (JVRs) and job-finding rates (JFRs) in Turkey between 2009–2015 and 2009–2018. We employed the instrumental variable approach to address potential endogeneity issues. While we found no significant causal impact of the Syrian refugees on JVR, they decreased JFR between 2009 and 2018. A reduction in JFR indicates that the Beveridge Curve shifted inwards, thereby raising matching efficiency and facilitating an improvement in labour market conditions. Furthermore, our research indicated differences in coefficients and significance in JVR and JFR across occupations, as well as different effects in these areas between the short and long term. However, the results demonstrate that the rapid and unexpected influx of Syrian refugees alleviated JVR and JFR in most of the occupation groups.

This paper uses the Current Population Survey to study older workers' transitions out of employment and into retirement during the first year of the pandemic. We find that, among workers ages 55 to 79, the likelihood of leaving employment over the course of a year rose by 6.7 percentage points, a 43-percent increase over baseline. Workers without a college degree, Asian–Americans, those whose jobs were not amenable to social distancing, and part-time workers saw disproportionate impacts. In contrast, the likelihood of retiring increased by 1 percentage point, and there was no immediate retirement boom for full-time workers under 70.

The article considers the place of Working Holiday visas in Australia’s migration policy and socio-economic planning. With the number of Working Holiday visa grants now topping 200,000 annually, Working Holiday Makers are significant participants in low-skilled work in Australia. The article argues that the programme is not adequately regulated to protect Working Holiday Makers in this work. In light of concerns around the exploitation of Working Holiday Makers, the article offers suggestions for reform to the programme. The article argues that the programme should be returned to its original conception of fostering a cultural experience for young migrants coming to Australia. It argues that work entitlements under the Working Holiday visa should be limited to work that is appropriate for young migrants on a brief cultural visit and that labour shortages should otherwise be filled using dedicated temporary labour migration visas which are properly designed to address labour shortages in the economy. Reform is necessary to protect the work conditions of local and migrant workers, to maintain Australia’s reputation as a country with high employment standards and to maintain positive relations with countries in the Working Holiday programme.

Over several decades Liberal-National Governments have encouraged Australian Public Service (APS) employers to uphold managerial prerogative by offering individual employment arrangements to employees. During the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Morrison Liberal-National Government’s Workplace Bargaining Policy reinforced this agenda. In place of collective bargaining, APS agency heads were encouraged to determine pay rises and new employment conditions for employees using Section 24 of the Public Service Act (PS Act) 1999. Workplace determinations did not need to be negotiated with public sector unions and some 85,500 employees across 57 APS agencies, or approximately 63% of the APS workforce, had accepted pay increases via workplace determinations by 31 December 2020. The widespread adoption of workplace determinations in the APS poses significant challenges for public sector unions and for the future of APS collective bargaining.

Recent research has identified a substantial increase in Indigenous mainstream employment since the mid-1990s, but there has been relatively little regional analysis of such employment. The aim of this article is to build on this previous research using the 2006 and 2011 censuses to provide a more disaggregated descriptive analysis of changes in the character of labour market outcomes for Indigenous Australians aged 15–64 years. One of the new findings in the article is that the employment of Indigenous youth (i.e. those aged 15–24 years) in remote areas is different from that of Indigenous youth in non-remote areas, but older Indigenous residents of such areas are not very different in employment terms. Policy-makers thus need to pay particular attention to Indigenous youth employment in remote areas because the failure to address these differentials may lead to a foreclosure of future labour market options. Policy also needs to facilitate Indigenous engagement in the mainstream economy by assisting Indigenous people to be work-ready, especially in ensuring that Indigenous skills are matched with employer demands, and expediting employment by informing businesses on how to provide an Indigenous-friendly workplace.

While traditional labour market estimates indicate that there has been little change in the proportion of workers holding multiple jobs in North America, survey instrument deficiencies may be hiding more substantial growth driven by the gig economy. To address this possibility, I test a broader measure of multiple jobholding to examine its prevalence in the Canadian workforce based on two national studies of workers (2011 Canadian Work Stress and Health Study and 2019 Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Study). Almost 20% of workers in 2019 reported multiple jobholding – a rate that is three times higher than Statistics Canada estimates. While multivariate analyses reveal that the multiple jobholding rate in 2019 was 30% higher than in the 2011 Canadian Work Stress and Health Study, multiple jobholders in 2019 were less likely to report longer work hours in secondary employment. Analyses also revealed that having financial difficulties is consistently associated with multiple jobholding in 2011 and 2019. Collectively, these findings suggest that while the spread of short-term work arrangements has facilitated Canadians’ secondary employment decisions, for many workers these decisions may reflect underlying problems in the quality of primary employment in Canada, rather than labour market opportunity. I discuss the potential links between multiple jobholding, the gig economy and employment precariousness.

Research about the demand for Indigenous labour and the relationship of Indigenous workers to their employers is relatively scarce. Even less is known about Indigenous businesses. Supply Nation defines an Indigenous business as those where Indigenous stakeholders hold majority equity, but some researchers have argued that this definition could be relaxed to include businesses in which Indigenous people hold only half the equity in the enterprise. This article uses data from the Industry Capability Network Queensland, which has collected basic business information on a large number of businesses operating in Queensland. The findings reveal that Indigenous businesses have substantially better outcomes for Indigenous employment than non-Indigenous businesses – a result that holds even when the definition of Indigenous business is relaxed. The article also documents how Indigenous employment is concentrated in larger businesses, in particular industry sectors. Non-Indigenous micro-businesses employ relatively few Indigenous workers, and future research can usefully explore why this is the case. To understand the issues involved, it will be necessary to collect multi-level data that link detailed information on employers and employees (including a substantial sample of Indigenous workers).

Australia was one of the few OECD countries to emerge from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) without facing a recession, usually defined as negative GDP growth for two consecutive quarters. However, the (overall) unemployment rate did increase following the GFC and has still not returned to pre–GFC levels. Unemployment rates for young people went up much more dramatically and remain high. This article investigates the impact of the GFC on youth unemployment and long-term unemployment. To anticipate our results, we find that the youth unemployment rates increased significantly owing to a fall in aggregate demand, although youth wages had been falling relative to adult wages. These findings do not support the commonly heard claim that youth wages are pricing young people out of the market.

During the past quarter century of neoliberal social, economic and political upheaval in Poland, the structure of workplaces has changed, and so have changes in worker attitudes to workplace and social solidarity. This article explores the links between changes to organisational and employment structures and shifts in worker attitudes, focusing on the implications of attitudinal shifts for the capacity for organised workplace resistance. It documents a loss of collective identity and a growth of individualism and social distrust. The analysis is based on publicly available economic and social statistics and the author’s own qualitative and quantitative research, drawn in part from computer-aided interviews in de-industrialising Lower Silesia. Evidence is provided that the extent and intensity of attitudinal shifts have varied according to changed workplace structures, based on privatisation and organisational size, and especially on the accompanying changes in workplace culture and climate. Increased individualism, based on formal decollectivisation, has been accompanied by attitudinal individualism and distrust of other people and social institutions. As a result, declining capacity for workplace resistance and an increased sense of powerlessness have increased workers’ susceptibility to right-wing propaganda.

This article examines real wage-earning, productivity and earning inequality in Indonesia, focusing on differentials among provinces and economic sectors. The post-1997 Asian crisis and democratic Indonesia mimic the global trend of disconnection between wages and productivity: labour productivity continues to rise while real wage-earning stagnates or declines. This disconnection has three consequences. First, it affects income or earning distribution as confirmed by rising overall earnings inequality. Second, while it explains the conventional wisdom of an economy-wide negative relationship between real wages and employment, it is of concern that these two variables do not move in the same direction as the productivity improvements that have occurred in large and medium establishments in the manufacturing sector. Third, the disconnection between productivity and earnings growth opens a new discussion on the broader issue of quality of growth, as the data show that robust economic growth in the post-crisis Indonesia has not been accompanied by parallel improvements in the quality of employment.

Incorporation of the informal sector in the general Kaleckian framework of agriculture–industry linkage is the primary target of this article. We show that the agriculture–informal sector interaction is distinctly different from the agriculture–formal sector relationship. Although agriculture supports the formal sector only from the supply-side, it helps the informal sector by providing both demand- and supply-side inducements. Next, contrary to the general perception of formal–informal complementarities, we rather propose a fundamental conflict. This conflict arises in the presence of the food supply-constraint or the generic resource-constraint. Subsequently, with these theoretical perspectives, we show that policies that are beneficial for the formal sector, in fact, constrict the informal economy.

Empirical studies in economics traditionally use a limited range of methods, usually based on particular types of regression analysis. Increasingly, sophisticated regression techniques require the availability of appropriate data sets, often longitudinal and typically collected at a national level. This raises challenges for researchers seeking to investigate issues requiring data that are not typically included in regular large-scale data. It also raises questions of the adequacy of relying mainly or solely on regression analysis for investigating key issues of economic theory and policy. One way of addressing these issues is to employ a mixed-methods research framework to investigate important research questions. In this article, we provide an example of applying a mixed-methods design to investigate the employment decisions of mature age women working in the aged care sector. We outline the use of a coherent and robust framework to allow the integrated collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. Drawing on particular examples from our analysis, we show how a mixed-methods approach facilitates richer insights, more finely grained understandings of causal relationships and identification of emergent issues. We conclude that mixed-methods research has the capacity to provide surprises and generate new insights through detailed exploratory data analysis.

This article investigates the time allocation choices of US workers between farm work and other job alternatives. Results indicate that green card farm workers tend to allocate fewer workweeks to farm employment than citizens and undocumented workers, in favour of better opportunities in the non-farm sector. There is evidence of an assimilation effect, whereby undocumented workers also tend to re-allocate their time from farm to non-farm employment as their residence tenure increases, even though they experience constrained mobility and visibility during periods of strict immigration control. In the context of employers’ violations of the existing labour laws that currently protect even the rights of undocumented workers, such turnover decisions seem justified. The findings raise concerns about whether any governmental effort to legalise the immigration status of such workers would reduce farm job turnover rates and increase farm employment retention, so long as labour standards are not enforced. Moreover, external economic shocks could more easily induce citizen and green card farm workers to abandon farm employment, whereas undocumented workers tend to remain in their farm jobs during such difficult times.

Based on European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) micro-data, we show that, on average, work autonomy has declined and work pressure has increased in most European Union countries since 1995. Since such evolution is substantially detrimental for workers, we examine whether workers of varied skill levels in different countries have been equally impacted. Descriptive analysis shows that low-skill clerical workers are the most affected and that Scandinavian countries fare better. Econometric results show that the decline in job satisfaction is due mainly to the increase in work pressure—which might be reaching a limit for high-skill workers—and that job satisfaction is most affected by an increase in work pressure when this is not accompanied by greater work autonomy.

To alleviate the imbalance in demographics, the Chinese government initiated the universal two-child policy nationwide in 2016, which has comprehensively impacted society, especially females. Our study investigates whether this policy has negatively affected workforce employment and income among women in urban areas. Based on the DID (difference-in-differences) method and the Heckman Two-Step Estimation, reliable empirical evidence shows that the universal two-child policy has significantly reduced women’s employment by 4.06% and decreased their labour income by 10.43%. Surprisingly, this policy has decreased the employment among women under 25 years old by 23.99% and has reduced the income of higher educated females by 29.59%. Furthermore, we find that the influence of the universal two-child policy on female employment has gradually increased from 2016 to 2018, and its impact on income has presented an evident time lag.

Understanding the distributional impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the labour market and ultimately on the living standards of the population is key to designing adequate policy responses to shield individuals’ and families’ livelihoods. This article illustrates the impact of COVID-19 on the labour market as well as on living standards in the case of a small open economy: Mauritius. We present descriptive evidence based on a unique set of telephone household surveys, representative of the Mauritian population, conducted between May 2020 and March 2021. We find that women had a higher risk of losing their job and leaving the labour force, reversing a decade-long trend of increasing labour force participation. Low-skill workers in sectors that depend on global demand – and even more so if employed informally – together with women were more likely to be affected by the crisis. One in three households reported a loss in income since the start of the pandemic, and the probability of experiencing this shock increases with the number of household members who lost their job and who were employed informally. From a policy perspective, our findings underscore the negative distributional consequences of the pandemic and provide substantive evidence for the viability of a further proactive policy stance to shield the livelihoods of vulnerable households during the economic recovery phase.

One of the biggest challenges faced by India today is to generate quality employment. Even in areas of rapid per capita income growth, typified by the Gujarat model of neoliberal state-sponsored technological development, there is a substantial and increasing decent work deficit. Across India more generally, the decent work deficit is, in fact, growing along several dimensions, leading to ‘growth without development’ or ‘non-inclusive growth’. This article analyses quality of employment in India across subnational spaces – among states and between rural and urban locations – using three International Labour Organisation decent work dimensions: ‘employment opportunity’, ‘social security benefits’ and ‘social dialogue’. The analysis is based on published government data, for the period 1993–1994 to 2011–2012 – the period covered by the liberalisation experiment. The conclusion is that economic growth has not contributed significantly to employment quality. Although employment opportunity is significantly higher in the developed states, coverage of social security benefits and scope for social dialogue among regular salaried/wage workers are significantly less in these areas than in underdeveloped regions. Indeed, employment opportunity is significantly higher in rural areas, and the condition of workers in urban areas is not significantly better than in rural locations. Furthermore, over time, the difference in quality of employment across subnational spaces has either increased or remained stagnant.

The introduction of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) heralded a methodological innovation for the study of Indian labour, allowing the researcher to build panels tracking urban individuals over a year. Using two rounds of the PLFS covering the periods 2017–18 and 2018–19, we construct a pooled panel of urban Indian individuals aged 15–65 and focus on women’s experiences in the labour force. We find evidence of low dynamism in the Indian economy, with women facing significant difficulties regarding labour force participation. While a majority of women remain outside the labour force throughout the year, those who do participate face significant disadvantages. Job-finding rates for women are half that of men, indicating weak demand for women’s labour in the economy. Women face significant exits from both employment and unemployment, with nearly 18% of employed women leaving their jobs and moving to non-participation over the year. Women’s relative disadvantages persist even when age and education are considered, with the lowest job-finding rates seen for young and graduate women, and rates of labour force exit much higher than that of men. This paper highlights the importance of looking at demand side questions when it comes to examining women’s labour force participation.