Once one moves beyond purely economic effects of employment polices to political and social outcomes, evidence becomes even scarcer. Studies of social transformations associated with recent macro-economic changes in lower and transition economies are mostly limited to isolated case or country studies that are hard to compare across societies.<sup>6</sup> Likewise, most studies that evaluate conflicts over employment policy between labor market ‘insiders” and “outsiders” are limited to high income countries (see for instance Rueda 2005, 2006, Shayo 2009).<sup>7</sup> To be sure, the dearth of evidence about the political and social outcomes from employment policies in lower income and transition economies also reflects data limitations. In particular value and perception surveys that provide the bulk of information for studies of political conflicts over labor market regulations in high income countries generally do not report employment-related information at the same level of detail in developing countries.

Yet we believe that even at current levels of data availability, important insights can be gained from more careful analysis of the link between work and social wellbeing. The first area where we see scope for new contributions involves inequalities in social outcomes between different groups in the labor market. While valuable progress has been made in the harmonization and documentation of internationally comparable indicators of social development, most cross country studies and data collection exercises still base their comparisons on national averages of social and institutional development indicators.<sup>8</sup> It is clear that this format is less useful for identifying differences in outcomes across individuals and groups with different attachment to the labor market; and it limits our ability to assess claims about the link between labor market outcomes, social exclusion and insider politics often made in the literature. For example, while it could be hypothesized that some countries attain relatively high levels of average social wellbeing because of policies that protect the interests of a majority of labor market “insiders” against the concerns of smaller groups of labor market “outsiders”, average measures of social development would conceal resulting inequalities in social outcomes. As a result these measures are less helpful for evaluating competing arguments about social and political tensions over labor market policies.

> 6 See for instance Wietzke 2009 for a review of evidence from Latin America.

> 7 For an exception see Blanchflower and Freeman 1997 who report preferences on economic and employment policies in a sample of Eastern European transition countries. For cross country studies on preferences over inflation see Shiller 1996, Di Tella et al 2001. Boeri et al. (2001). Di Tella and Mc Culloch 1996 and Luttmer 2001 report evidence on attitudes toward welfare state policies and redistribution.

> 8Examples include the Indices of Social Development (ISD) hosted by Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (http://www.indsocdev.org/) and the World Governance indicators data base by Kaufman et al (2010). See also the literature on social cohesion cited above.  Many of these studies rely on the same value and perception surveys we use below.

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