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Despite India achieving many milestones under MGNREGA, the external and internal shocks result in below potential outcomes in employment demand and generation. This study examines how these shocks matter and how the migration-prone regions perform.

This study, employing district-level data from 2018 to 2021, investigates how climate change and COVID-19 have affected the employment demand and supply. We applied RE-GLS and IV-2SLS regressions to examine the effects of shocks on employment demand and generation, respectively. The difference in difference panel model is employed to test the spatial effects of the pandemic. Further, we used RE-GLS and extended regression model to examine how external shocks interacting with migration affect unemployment rates.

It was found that the pandemic increased employment demand and generation. This reflects the adverse effects of the pandemic and the swift action by the government. However, the responses were possibly different during climate shocks. The wage differential increased employment demand. However, demand decreased due to poor support from the support staff. The employment generation was higher in migration-prone districts, indicating that seasonal migration, being a lean-season phenomenon, continues to occur despite employment generation.

This study contributes to the literature in several ways. It captures spatial variations while examining the impact of climate change and COVID-19. It investigates the performance of MGNREGA in migration-prone areas. In effect, the findings provide policymakers with greater insight into the issues.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-02-2024-0132.

Skilled migrant (SM) women play a key role in developed countries especially in healthcare and education in easing staffing shortages and migrate expecting to gain qualification-matched employment (QME). The aim of this review is to assess whether SM women gain the anticipated QME, equitably compared to their skilled counterparts and to examine why and how they do so.

I conducted a systematic literature review to derive empirical studies to assess if, why and how SM women achieve QME (1) using SM women-only samples and comparative samples including SM women, and (2) examining whether they gain QME directly on or soon after migration or indirectly over time through undertaking alternative, contingent paths.

Only a minority of SM women achieve the anticipated QME directly soon after migration and less often than their skilled counterparts. Explaining the mechanism for achieving QME, other women, especially due to having young families, indirectly undertake alternative, lower-level contingent paths enabling them to ascend later to QME.

The SM literature gains new knowledge from revealing how SM women can gain positions post-migration comparable to their pre-migration qualifications through undertaking the alternative, contingent paths of steppingstone jobs and academic study, especially as part of agreed familial strategies. This review results in a theoretical mechanism (mediation by a developmental contingency path) to provide an alternative mechanism by which SM women achieve QME.

In the process of making agricultural production decisions in rural households, severe weather conditions, either extreme cold or heat, may squeeze the labor input in the agricultural sector, leading to a reallocation of labor between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. By applying a dataset with a wide latitude range, this study empirically confirms the influence of extreme temperatures on the agricultural labor reallocation, reveal the mechanism of farmers’ adaptive behavioral decision and therefore enriches the research on the impact of climate change on rural labor markets and livelihood strategies.

This study utilizes data from Chinese meteorological stations and two waves of China Household Income Project to examine the impact and behavioral mechanism of extreme temperatures on rural labor reallocation.

(1) Extremely high and low temperatures had led to a reallocation of labor force from agricultural activities to non-farm employment, with a more pronounced effect from extreme high temperature events. (2) Extreme temperatures influence famers’ decision in abandoning farmland and reducing investment in agricultural machinery, thus creating an interconnected impact on labor mobility. (3) The reallocation effect of rural labor induced by extreme temperatures is particularly evident for males, persons that perceives economic hardship or labor in economically active areas.

By applying a dataset with a wide latitude range, this study empirically confirms the influence of extreme temperatures on the agricultural labor reallocation, and reveals the mechanism of farmers’ adaptive behavioral decision and therefore enriches the research on the impact of climate change on rural labor markets and livelihood strategies.

This paper aims to analyse the short- and long-term effects of entering the Spanish labour market under tough economic conditions on young immigrant–native earnings and employment outcomes.

The authors use cohorts, where the entry cohort into the labour market is the unit of observation. As a database, the authors use the continuous sample of working histories covering the period 2007–2021. Then, the authors estimate the model using weighted least squares.

The results show that the great recession and COVID-19 led to a blockage at the entrance of the labour market, reducing the number of workers. Additionally, the authors observe an adverse impact in terms of employment and earnings on those entering the labour market. Besides, this effect varies in intensity and persistence for natives and immigrants, as well as by country of birth, age of entry, gender and educational level.

A contribution to the literature is the analysis of the earnings and employment trajectories of young people entering the Spanish labour market for the first time during an adverse shock, such as the 2008 economic crisis or the COVID-19 crisis, and the possible differences that exist between native and immigrant workers. So, the authors analyse the labour market trajectories of workers covering the most recent years. Likewise, the authors carry out an extensive heterogeneity analysis in which they distinguish workers by educational level, gender, age of entry into the labour market and immigrants by their country of birth. This represents an additional contribution. The use of a cohort approach also contributes to the existing literature.

Under the circumstances of the accelerated technological advance and the overlapping of various global crises in the recent years, one of the main strategic priorities of the European Union in medium and long terms consists of building resilient regional and local communities which implies the aim to protect citizens against the impact of climate changes. Considering the essential role of the human capital in this endeavor, this chapter aims to investigate the relationship between human resources and economic development focusing a SWOT analysis in the case of Romania taking into account recent developments and trends of the European and global labor market related to various aspects induced by the green transition. The analysis of the structural demo-economic characteristics of Romania’s population revealed a decline of the total population, against the background of negative demographic and net migration, the increase in the average and median age of the total population, the rise in demographic and economic dependency ratios representing serious challenges for the development strategy on short, medium and long terms. To these, increasing quantitative and qualitative shortages in the labor market are added, which complicate the advancement of the green transition in Romania. In the conclusions of this chapter, strategic milestones on policies and measures in the short, medium and long terms at macroeconomic and labor market levels are proposed.

This pan-Canadian study examines the information practices of STEM-trained immigrant women to Canada as they navigate workfinding and workplace integration. Our study focuses on a population of highly skilled immigrant women from across Canada and uses an information practice lens to examine their lived experiences of migration and labour market integration. As highly trained STEM professionals in pursuit of employment, our participants have specific needs and challenges, and as we explore these, we consider the intersection of their information practices with government policies, settlement services and the hiring practices of STEM employers.

We conducted a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with 74 immigrant women across 13 Canadian provinces and territories to understand the nature of their engagement with employment-seeking in STEM sectors. This article reports the findings related to the settlement and information experiences of the immigrant women as they navigate new information landscapes.

As immigrants, as women and as STEM professionals, the experiences of the 74 participants reflect both marginality and privilege. The reality of their intersectional identities is that these women may not be well-served by broader settlement resources targeting newcomers, but neither are the specific conventions of networking and job-seeking in the STEM sectors in Canada fully apparent or accessible to them. The findings also point to the broader systemic and contextual factors that participants have to navigate and that shape in a major way their workfinding journeys.

The findings of this pan-Canadian study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. Through interviews with these STEM professionals, we highlight the barriers and challenges of an under-studied category of migrants (the highly skilled and “desirable” type of immigrants). We provide a critical discussion of their settlement experiences and expose the idiosyncrasies of a system that claims to value skilled talent while structurally making it very difficult to deliver on its promises to recruit and retain highly qualified personnel. Our findings point to specific aspects of these skilled professionals’ experiences, as well as the broader systemic and contextual factors that shape their workfinding journey.

Our study explores the effects of immigration on the employment of native middle-skilled workers, focusing on how this effect varies with the specificity of their occupational skill bundles.

Exploiting the 2002 opening of the Swiss labor market to EU workers and using register data on the location and occupation of these workers, our findings provide novel results on the labor market effects of immigration.

We show that the inflow of EU workers led to an increase in the employment of native middle-skilled workers with highly specific occupational skills. This finding could be attributed to immigrant workers reducing existing skill gaps, enhancing the quality of job-worker matches, and alleviating firms' capacity restrictions. This allowed firms to create new jobs, thereby providing increased employment options for middle-skilled workers with highly specialized skills.

Previous literature has predominantly highlighted the disadvantages of specific occupational skills compared to general skills in the context of labor market shocks. However, our findings reveal that workers with specific occupational skills can benefit from an immigration-driven labour market shock. These results suggest that policy conclusions regarding the role of specific occupational skills should be more nuanced.

This paper aims to examine the impacts of unstable off-farm employment on the probability and stability of farmland rent-out and explore its mechanisms.

The paper adopts Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Probit, Tobit, Order probit models with two-way fixed effects to conduct empirical analysis based on the balanced panel data collected in 2016 and 2023 with a national representativeness sample of 1,206 rural households in 100 villages across 5 provinces in China.

The empirical results showed that unstable off-farm employment had negative effects on the probability of farmland rent-out, but it had no effects on the stability of farmland rent-out. The mechanism analysis showed that unstable off-farm employment affected the probability of farmland rent-out by decreasing the probability of purchasing houses in city and endowment insurance with high pension. Heterogeneity analysis indicated that the negative effect of unstable off-farm employment was much larger for the households with higher share of labor engaging in off-farm employment outside home county, elder members in the households and those located in the villages of mountain areas.

This paper is the first to define the unstable off-farm employment from the perspective of incontiguous off-farm employment for several years, which could capture the normality rather than particular case in a certain year of off-farm employment among rural labors. Using these new measurements of unstable off-farmland, this paper examined the impacts and mechanisms of share of unstable off-farm employment on the probability and stability of farmland rent-out.

Tourism and hospitality employment have long faced widely recognised challenges with regard to employment, its workforce and the workplace environment, issues that have been addressed by generations of policymakers and practitioners without evident success or solution. These wicked problems are frequently characterised by inherent paradoxes and, therefore, accepting the tenets of paradox theory provides the basis for recognising the need to accept contradictions as a reality which a search for solutions will not resolve. This chapter presents six examples of wicked problems in tourism and hospitality employment, which are underpinned by paradoxes as proxies for the much wider range of intractable problems that beset policy-making and practice in this vital area of tourism and hospitality. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which wicked problems can be accommodated, and stakeholders can learn to understand and live with paradoxes.

Employees facing challenges in their careers – i.e. female, migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees – might expect job searches to have a low likelihood of success and might therefore more often stay in unsatisfactory positions. The goal of this study is to discover inequalities in job mobility for these employees.

We rely on a large sample of Dutch public sector employees (N = 30,709) and study whether employees with challenges in their careers are hampered in translating job dissatisfaction into job searches. Additionally, we assess whether this is due to their perceptions of labor market alternatives.

Findings show that non-Western migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction than their advantaged counterparts, whereas women are more likely than men to do so. Additionally, we find that although they perceive labor market opportunities as limited, this does not affect their propensity to search for different jobs.

This paper is novel in discovering inequalities in job mobility by analyzing whether employees facing challenges in their careers are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction and therefore more likely to remain in unsatisfactory positions.