The introduction of social protections for individuals engaged in paid employment frequently comes up against arguments that such measures would have an adverse impact on employment, reduce access to formal jobs, and result in greater informality. The argument is that, while well intentioned, such policies distort labor markets and generate significant economic costs that either leave some workers worse off than they would have been in the absence of such protection, or the interventions become a drag on overall economic performance, encumbering the process of development.
Promotive social protection programs aim to increase income and capabilities and could help address structural drivers of HIV-vulnerability like poverty, lack of education and gender inequality. Unemployed and out-of-school young women bear the brunt of HIV infection in Botswana, but rarely benefit from such economic empowerment programs. Using a qualitative exploratory study design and a participatory research approach, this paper explores factors affecting perceived program benefit and potential solutions to barriers.
We compare the effects of labour market shocks and social policy responses on people’s welfare following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. We assess the role of formal and informal sector labour incomes and social transfers in the changes observed in the distribution of income and welfare. We worked with harmonized household survey microdata and performed a microdecomposition analysis by income source.
We analyze in this paper the decline in social insurance coverage in Egypt from 2007 to 2021 to determine the extent to which it was due to compositional shits in the structure of the economy or the workforce as opposed to changes in coverage for specific types of jobs and workers. We conclude that only a fraction of the decline in coverage can be attributed to structural changes in the economy or to changes in the characteristics of firms and workers.
Young people, and in particular those that needed to enter the labour market for the first time were also strongly impacted by the pandemic, as witnessed by the notable increase of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET), which marked the end of the six-year trend of declining NEET numbers.