What do initial empirical investigations suggest about decent work as a whole?
Despite serious limitations of data, it may be possible to make the following points about the decent work agenda.
- formal workforces are limited, ranging between 7 to 16.7 per cent of the labour forces in low and middle income countries respectively.
- socially protected persons are between 6.5 to 17.3 per cent of the population in low and middle income countries respectively.
- expenditure by government on social security as a percentage of national income is less than 3 per cent in low income countries and around 9.5 per cent in middle income countries.
- employment and insecurity are linked in developing countries and the "working poor" are likely to constitute around 30 per cent of employed persons in low income countries and around 7 per cent in middle income countries.
- working children in the age bracket of 10 to14 are also around 18.1 per cent in low income countries and 8.7 per cent in middle income countries.
- civil liberties and measures of freedoms to organise are also better in middle income countries compared to low income countries but these are qualitative indicators.
- the four dimensions of the ILO agenda, by and large, improve with the economic growth of society but policy interventions that can directly improve (or indeed worsen) indicators that proxy these dimensions are feasible.
- distinct patterns obtaining between dimensions of decent work show employment and security dimensions to be closely tied to each other at lower levels of income, while a general pattern of expected linkages is observable across all dimensions in middle income countries.
- good performance in the same direction on several indicators can be significantly shown for some groups of countries and deeper reasons for such complementarities may concern issues of income distribution and institutional quality.
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