Publication | 19/03/2015

Measuring Decent Work

The Millennium Development Goals’ post-2015 agenda needs to incorporate new approaches, write Jann Lay, Sarah Linde, Martin Ostermeier and Sebastian Prediger.

Weaving work
© UN Photo/ Basile Zorna

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the design of a post‐2015 development framework by proposing indicators to monitor employment outcomes. Our analysis of the current MDG employment indicators shows that measurement problems, the inappropriate use of aggregate statistics, ambiguous interpretability, and assumptions that often do not hold true in the context of developing countries are major shortcomings of the current indicators.

Based on this critique, we develop a new set of indicators for productive employment and decent work. We propose four indicators: (i) the growth of labor value added per worker, (ii) the working poverty rate, (iii) (a) the share of workers receiving less than an absolute labor income and (b) the share of workers receiving less than 60 percent of the median labor income. We demonstrate the empirical application of these indicators using the country cases of Uganda and Peru.

Martin Ostermeier, Sarah Linde, Jann Lay, Sebastian Prediger, SMARTer Indicators for Decent Work in a Post-2015 Development Agenda: A Discussion and a Proposal, GIGA Working Paper, No. 266, Februar 2015




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