# **1. Introduction**

Good jobs are associated with greater productivity and better living standards and are critical to achieving sustainable growth and poverty reduction (World Bank 2012). However, most working poor in developing countries do not have access to good jobs with enough earnings and benefits to allow them to meet their basic needs or with adequate working conditions to improve their well-being (Fields 2012). Global studies measuring job quality across countries have typically relied on a single indicator, such as formality or jobs. Likewise, only a few multicountry studies have examined job characteristics beyond a single indicator. They have also usually focused on single regions, such as Latin America, Europe, and Africa, particularly because of the difficulty in harmonizing microdata across countries (Bocquier, Nordman, and Vescovo 2010; Brummund, Mann, and Rodríguez-Castelán 2018; Leschke and Watt 2014; Sehnbruch et al. 2020).

To close this knowledge gap and to support global efforts to measure and monitor trends in job quality across developing countries, particularly in light of Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8) on “fostering sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all,” this paper proposes a multidimensional measure of job quality that can track and benchmark the quality of employment across developing countries. In the presence of the increased availability and improved quality of the labor force and household surveys in many developing countries (Lewandowski, Góra, and Lis 2017), this paper also contributes to a growing body of literature on the quality of jobs by producing all indicators from microdata, which also allows meaningful disaggregation across sociodemographic groups, industries, and locations in multiple countries. This flexibility is important in uncovering the characteristics of employment that may be correlated with poverty, especially among disadvantaged groups, such as women and low-skill workers.

The analysis follows well-established international conventions in the selection of job quality characteristics. Indicators to assess decent work for all under SDG 8 include disaggregated measures (including by sex, age, occupation, and persons with disabilities) on informal employment, hourly earnings, unemployment rates, the share of youth not in education and of children engaged in child labor, the frequency of occupational injuries, and compliance with labor rights.<sup>1</sup> Similarly, the International Labour Organization (ILO) defines “decent work for all” as productive work that delivers a fair income, with workplace security and social protection, prospects for development and social integration, freedom to organize, and equality of opportunity.<sup>2</sup> Overall, most frameworks that measure job quality agree that a good job requires sufficient earnings to improve living standards, adequate benefits, appropriate security and safety provision, and satisfaction. Beyond these desired characteristics of a good job, jobs may also affect the well-being of others through positive spillovers. This is the case, for instance, of women’s employment, which often results in improvements in children’s well-being, or jobs in firms with

> 1 Specifically, the indicators for measuring progress toward SDG 8 related to “decent work for all” are the share of informal employment in nonagriculture employment by sex; average hourly earnings of women and men employees by occupation, age, and persons with disabilities; the unemployment rate by sex, age, and persons with disabilities; the share of youth (ages 15–24) not in education, employment, or training; the share and number of children ages 5–17 engaged in child labor, by sex and age; the frequency of fatal and nonfatal occupational injuries; and the national compliance of labor rights (freedom of association and collective bargaining) based on International Labour Organization (ILO) textual sources and national legislation, by sex and migrant status. See SDG Tracker, Sustainable Development Goal 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth, Our World in Data, Global Change Data Lab, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, https://sdg-tracker.org/economic-growth.

> 2 See “Measuring Job Quality: Difficult but Necessary,” ILOSTAT, International Labour Organization, Geneva, https://ilostat.ilo.org/measuring-job-quality-difficult-but-necessary/.

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