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Decent work in development
Research in this area will aim to deliver better evidence on and analysis of the impact of different development paths on work and employment, the influence of globalization, the conditions under which advantage can be taken by enterprises and communities of global opportunities, and the contribution of work and employment to development goals.
This work will include in-depth analysis of the experiences of a small number of countries, representing different policy choices and situations in the global economy. These studies will carefully review how employment and labour concerns and institutions have been treated within development policies, the role of the public sector, the functioning of labour and product markets, and the implications for growth, decent work and distribution. Collaboration in this work will be sought with sister research institutions in the UN system, such as UNRISD and WIDER. It will also draw on the integrated country level approaches to decent work that have been developed in the ILO in recent years.
A second, more specific goal will be a better understanding of the causal relationships between selected labour standards and economic development. This work will critically assess competing hypotheses as to whether labour standards are a source or consequence of economic development, or both, and how this relationship is influenced by a wider set of labour institutions, including the type of legal system, institutions for representation and social dialogue and the effectiveness of labour inspection. This may include both econometric work and more historical methods, and will build on current Institute research in this area.
A related project will examine the role of labour law in development, with particular reference to the informal economy. Questions are sometimes raised about the purchase and regulatory effectiveness of national labour legislation. Inadequate or poorly applied regulation of the informal economy creates an unfair playing field for firms that respect the rules, and undermines efforts to realise rights and standards throughout the economy. There is a need to examine how labour law is responding to this challenge in different areas of the world. The project will examine the direct and indirect effects of legal frameworks on the poor in selected developing countries. Of particular interest seems to be the role played by other bodies of law, e.g. constitutional and human rights law, or commercial law, and the relationship between these and labour law proper.
Development options, even at the local level, are to a significant extent determined by the opportunities of the global economy and access to global production systems. An important strand of research is therefore to understand the process of creation of jobs and incomes locally from participation in global systems - the space for local enterprises and policies, the nature of the jobs created and the distribution of the benefits. New developments involving networks of small firms linked to global markets should be explored further. Research in this area will benefit from and connect with ILO policy analysis and technical cooperation projects in this field.
Another important aspect of the connection with the global economy concerns the cross-border movement of workers. There is a link between migration and changes in production systems such as "delocalization" and offshoring, and associated changes in trade and investment patterns. More work is needed to understand the economics of international labour markets and how they relate to the growth of global production systems. Building on current work on migration at the Institute, this research will explore further the potential and actual contribution of migration to development goals in countries of both origin and destination in the light of these global changes, addressing both economic and legal issues.
Much of this work needs to be grounded in the realities of developing countries, and so must be carried out in cooperation with institutions and researchers from those countries. It is particularly important for the ILO's policy agenda to be able to address the needs and aspirations of the poor, who are particularly found in the rural and informal economies.
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