expertise that raises productivity in other firms (World Bank 2012). While jobs with positive spillovers have the highest value for society, the focus of this paper is individual job quality.

The measure of job quality presented in this study is practical without compromising the intended purpose. The selection of dimensions and indicators to determine the quality of employment considers availability and comparability across developing countries. The proposed approach includes four dimensions of job quality that can be found in most countries: sufficient income to overcome poverty, access to job benefits, employment stability, and adequate working conditions. These dimensions are broadly consistent with previous multicountry approaches (Brummund, Mann, and Rodríguez-Castelán 2018; Sehnbruch et al. 2020). Departing from these four dimensions, the paper adopts the Alkire-Foster method—originally conceived to measure multidimensional poverty—for aggregating the characteristics of good jobs into a single index. Limited data availability on the self-employed and casual workers in most developing countries (generally in agriculture) prompted a focus on wage employment. Because the analysis focuses on wage employment, the proposed measure could then be interpreted as a lower bound of job quality, whereby the job quality score for other employment categories is equal to zero. Given all these factors and based on a robust effort of collection and the ex-post harmonization of household and labor force surveys, the proposed job quality measure (JQM) for wage employment in this paper includes a common set of indicators across 40 developing countries and six geographic regions.<sup>3</sup> The main results of the analysis show that the quality of wage employment displays strong heterogeneity among economic sectors. In the public administration, finance and business services, and utilities sectors, most workers have stable jobs and earn a wage above the poverty line, and about two-thirds receive jobrelated benefits and are linked to higher job satisfaction. The quality of wage employment also varies by education, sex, age, and location. Older workers (ages 25 or more) have higher job quality than workers ages 16–24. A significant education premium (tertiary education versus primary education) is found in most sectors, suggesting that higher education secures greater job quality in the form of higher benefits and stability. Women and men show similar levels of job quality at the aggregate and sectoral levels. However, there are some differences across JQM dimensions. Thus women fare especially well in the working conditions dimension, while men perform better in terms of the income dimension. These results may be driven by self-selection among highly skilled women into wage employment across developing countries. The results show a significant gap in job quality between urban and semiurban or rural areas in all four dimensions.

This paper contributes to policy debates and the literature in four ways. First, the analysis covers 40 countries across all regions of the world, providing a valuable benchmark for international comparisons. The global geographic scope also allows the main correlates of quality of employment to be identified, such as economic growth and private sector investment. Second, the proposed index complements and expands the traditional proxies of good quality jobs, such as informality or wages, to include both monetary and nonmonetary dimensions of jobs, augmented by criteria capturing working conditions. The multidimensional nature of the JQM and its well-defined individual characteristics allow users to identify the main drivers behind the aggregate measure. Third, the JQM can be disaggregated by economic sector, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics (including sex, age, educational attainment), and

> 3 These regions are used by the World Bank for administrative purposes. The countries are geographically located as follows: 12 in Sub-Saharan Africa, six in East Asia and the Pacific, 12 in Latin America and the Caribbean, two in Europe and Central Asia, six in South Asia, and two in the Middle East and North Africa.

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