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Latin America experienced a long period of sustained growth since 2003 that positively impacted social and labor market indicators, including poverty. This paper contributes to the understanding of this process as it carries out a comparative study of poverty and indigence dynamics in five Latin American countries during 2003–2012. Specifically, it extends the analysis of a previously published study by broadening the time coverage and examining indigence mobility. It analyzes the extent to which countries with different levels of poverty (extreme poverty) incidence diverge in terms of exit and entry rates, and identifies the relative importance of the frequency and impact of events associated with poverty transitions. For this, a dynamic analysis of panel data is carried out using regular household surveys. Sizeable rates of poverty and indigence movements were observed in all five countries and it was found that a large proportion of poor or indigent households experienced positive events, mainly related to the labor market; however, only a small fraction of them actually exited poverty and indigence. It appeared, therefore, that even when the economy behaved reasonably well, high levels of labor turnover and income mobility (even of a negative nature) still prevail, mainly associated with the high level of precariousness and the undeveloped system of social protection that characterize the studied countries.

The South African government actively intervenes in the labor market in the pursuit of redress of social injustice. These interventions are complicated by economics and have a direct effect on intentions to turnover. In addition, South Africa has a dual labor market, with a high unemployment rate among lesser skilled workers, and a skills shortage at the top of the labor market.

There are four clear eras in the labor market of post-Apartheid South Africa. The first era was after democratic elections in 1994, when the government focused on nation-building with the introduction of indigenization programs. The second era was characterized by economic prosperity and an intensification of indigenization programs. The third era was characterized by rampant state corruption and increased regulatory uncertainty. During this period, the economy stagnated and unemployment increased. Firms restructured and lower-level workers were retrenched and higher-level skilled workers left the country. In 2018, a new president undertook to grow the South African economy and attract foreign direct investment. Despite these efforts, there was a spike in South Africans emigrating, increasing the turnover of highly skilled South Africans of all races.

Economics and politics create both push and pull factors and many unintended consequences, and the dual labor market reacts differently to labor markets than in developed economies. The lower-skilled employees lose their jobs as the economy contracts, while highly skilled jobs remain difficult to fill. However, skilled professionals nonetheless feel increasingly uncertain about their future employability.

Job finding and separation are not well studied in economies with high labor informality. In this chapter, we contribute to filling the gap in the literature of labor turnover, proposing a methodology to estimate both indicators in an economy with high informality. To this end, we estimate indicators of job finding and separation rates for Peru's developing economy, in which labor informality stands at 70%. We find that, on average, these indicators in the formal sector are similar to those estimated in developed economies; however, in the informal sector, the calculated indicators are approximately two times higher than those of the formal sector. The two indicators show considerable heterogeneity in the informal sector according to several observable categories; in addition, the separation rate is countercyclical, and the finding rate is procyclical, this cyclicality being greater in the formal sector.

The growing incidence of precarious employment across many sectors is a serious challenge for a developing country like India. Neo-liberal arguments justify precarity as essential for the development of the free market economy and advocate realigning human resource practices with an ever-changing business environment and labor cost conditions. This chapter seeks to identify the determinants and dynamics surrounding precarity of workers engaged in temporary employment in India. It uses the unique Employment and Unemployment Survey data set published by the National Sample Survey Organisation of Government of India for two time periods 2009–2010 (66th Round) and 2011–2012 (68th Round) to bring out the dimensions of precarity and identify the determinants (both micro- and macro-levels) of participation in temporary employment. We find that precarious employment is most likely to affect the young, women, non-union members, those belonging to minority and socially deprived communities with low land holding and low educational status. Precarious employment is also most pronounced in states where labor-intensive industries are exposed to global import competition and where labor laws are rigid. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for the economic and social policies that Indian governments have adopted in recent years.

This paper provides household lifetime inequality indexes derived from representative U.S. labor market data. We obtain this result by using estimates of the household search model proposed by Flabbi and Mabli (2012). Inequality indexes computed on the benchmark model shows that inequality in utility values is substantially different from inequality in earnings and wages and that inequality at the cross-sectional level is significantly different from inequality at the lifetime level. Both results deliver original policy implications that would have not been captured without using our approach. In particular, we find that a counterfactual policy experiment consisting in a mean-preserving spread of the wage offers distributions increases lifetime inequality in wages and earnings but not in utility. When comparing inequality at the individual level between men and women, we find inequality in wages and earnings to be higher for husbands than wives but inequality in utility to be higher for wives. A counterfactual decomposition shows that the job offers parameters are the main source of the gender differential.

This article investigates how internationalisation through labour mobility can strengthen collective bargaining in coordinated market economies. It shows how new political cleavages generated by internationalisation can foster the re-regulation of labour markets and how the alliance between trade unions and employers in sheltered sectors of the economy can increase domestic coordination to limit wage competition. These two mechanisms explain why the opening of the labour market for EU workers and services in Switzerland has been followed by a re-regulation process in which collective bargaining coordination has strengthened despite the weakness of organised labour and the resistance of export industries. Following the opening of the labour market, the coverage of collective bargaining has increased and the number of workers covered by extended collective agreements nearly tripled.