Conference Agenda

This paper aims at comparing various characteristics of labour force participation and employment, either formal or informal, for both men and women in seven emerging or developing economies (Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and South Africa) using pseudo panels and the Age-Period-Cohort method. This study allows us to disentangle the effects of three factors (age-effect, time/period-effect and cohort effect) shaping participation and employment patterns and understand better how the life-courses of individuals are influenced by these three factors. We provide detailed results for each one of these effects and put a specific focus on the case of women.

With regards to the age effects, we observe that in the case of men, the seven countries share relatively similar profiles of participation with the standard inverted-U shape indicating that men increase substantially their chances of participation in the young adulthood, then participation reaches a relative plateau in most of the countries, and starts an accelerated decreasing pattern around the fifties. In the case of women, we see much more diversity. Only South Africa shows a standard inverted-U shape for women’s participation. In other countries, labour force participation seems to be more affected by childbearing with noticeable differences in terms of amplitude.

The analysis of time-effect allows us to observe a clear and consistent pattern of increased female participation in cases of medium and large recessions in the countries concerned (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico). This confirms the hypothesis of an added worker effect. This has mainly concerned women with basic and to a lesser extent intermediary levels of education and in majority through the channel of informal employment. However, we do not find the same pattern in case of milder contractions on a larger set of countries. In case of mild recessions, female participation is rather pro- or acyclical.

Finally, regarding cohort effects (or long-term effects reflecting structural changes), we see that in most cases, newer generations have very different behaviours than past generations. We observe a long-term downward trend in the male participation in most countries with the exception of Mexico and Egypt. The case of women shows more divergent long-term trends according to regions and education levels. However, the long-term evolutions in male and female participation could indicate that those will not increase naturally in the coming years simply through generations renewal.

Vietnam today becomes one of the most successful developing countries thanks to enormous efforts of legal reforms, including those in the labour field. The labour law becoming effect on 1st January 2023 might touch key fundamental principles and rights at work, but there are concerns that do not suffice, especially, in context of Vietnam. How effective new strategies for labour law enforcement? What enforcement mechanism could be deployed to extend protection to those workers and enterprises increasingly lying outside strict purview of the labour code and beyond the reach of labour administration?

The aim of this paper is to examine what key challenges that constrained the above enforcement mechanism and explored different perspectives of strengthening the current labour inspectorate system and engaging more cooperation with the representative organizations of the workers and the organizations of the employers, particularly in times of critical crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, and the climate change.

The research paper is based on desk review of the available recent sectorial study reports (electronics and garment sectors) and selected expert interviews.

Lessons drawn from the above paper are expected to enhance better understanding and significantly benefit the ILO constituents with insightful knowledge and good practices that help future planning and/or programming for practical actions to address the crises. Hopefully, those lessons and field experience in terms of institutional arrangements and responses will also motivate other countries to deal with the similar cases as Vietnam does deal with the multiple crises.

This study examines the probability of old-age workers transitioning into retirement and the risk of poverty that may accompany it. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for European Union countries (EU27) collected over eight waves ranging from 2004 to 2019/2020. In order to estimate the correlates of transition into retirement, we consider two models: a pooled Logit with clustered standard errors at individual level, and a random-effects panel Logit model with robust standard errors. The consecutive model to estimate the effect of transitioning into retirement in one’s risk of poverty adopts an instrumental variable approach. Results indicate that retirees are less likely to fall into risk of poverty compared to those who are still in the workforce. Factors such as education, gender, household size, and marital status are found to be associated with the probability of transition into retirement and hence risk of poverty. Though studies documented higher risk of poverty for retirees, our findings show the opposite, which could be due to a combination of pension systems characteristics, longer life expectancy, high savings, and participation in social assistance programmes.