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The purpose of this paper is to focus on large-scale portfolio entrepreneurship and its impact on the creation of stable wage employment in African economies.

The three studies focussed on Egypt, Uganda, and Malawi were all exploratory, inductive, and qualitative studies, which involved semi-structured interviews with 65 entrepreneurial founders of some of these countries’ most prominent business portfolios between 2009 and 2012. The data were collected through face-to-face interviews, which lasted between one and four hours, with the founders of each of these portfolios.

This inductive and qualitative study finds a connection between the creation of stable wage-paying jobs and portfolio entrepreneurship in three countries, representing three of the four different archetypal African economies. It also finds a strong connection between the development of new industries and portfolio entrepreneurship.

The practical and societal implications of these findings are incredibly important. The current and looming shortage of stable wage employment in Africa is reaching calamitous proportions. The growth in religion-affiliated terrorism and high-risk economic migration to Europe can be directly related to the lack of employment opportunities in African nations. The findings indicate that portfolio entrepreneurs are major players in the creation of such employment opportunities and government policies focussing on this area, as compared to focussing solely on SMEs, may be more effective in mitigating some of the drivers for emigration and terrorism.

This is the only study of its kind that investigates the role of large-scale portfolio entrepreneurship in the growth of employment opportunities in Africa.

Long considered the classic coordinated market economy featuring employment security and relatively little employment precarity, the German labor market has undergone profound changes in recent decades. We assess the evidence for a rise in precarious employment in Germany from 1984 to 2013. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel through the Luxembourg Income Study, we examine low-wage employment, working poverty, and temporary employment. We also analyze changes in the demographics and the education/skill level of the German labor force. Although employment overall has increased, there has been a simultaneous significant increase in earnings and wage inequality. Moreover, there has been a clear increase in all three measures of precarious employment. The analyses reveal that models including a wide variety of independent variables – demographic, education/skill, job/work characteristics, and region – cannot explain the rise of precarious employment. Instead, we propose institutional change is the most plausible explanation. In addition to reunification and major social policy and labor market reforms, we highlight the dramatic decline of unionization among German workers. We conclude that while there are elements of stability to the German coordinated market economy, Germany increasingly exhibits substantial dualization, liberalization, inequality, and precarity.

This paper tries to identify the wage gap between informal and formal workers and tests for the two-tier structure of the informal labour market in Poland.

The author employs the propensity score matching (PSM) technique and use data from the Polish Labour Force Survey (LFS) for the period 2009–2017 to estimate the wage gap between informal and formal workers, both at the means and along the wage distribution. The author uses two definitions of informal employment: (1) employment without a written agreement and (2) employment while officially registered as unemployed at a labour office. In order to reduce the bias resulting from the non-random selection of individuals into informal employment, he uses a rich set of control variables representing several individual characteristics.

After controlling for observed heterogeneity, the author finds that on average informal workers earn less than formal workers, both in terms of monthly earnings and hourly wage. This result is not sensitive to the definition of informal employment used and is stable over the analysed time period (2009–2017). However, the wage penalty to informal employment is substantially higher for individuals at the bottom of the wage distribution, which supports the hypothesis of the two-tier structure of the informal labour market in Poland.

The main contribution of this study is that it identifies the two-tier structure of the informal labour market in Poland: informal workers in the first quartile of the wage distribution and those above the first quartile appear to be in two partially different segments of the labour market.

We critique existing literature on the rise of precarious work because of its inattention to the historical organization of work by race and gender. We use intersectional theory to develop a racial–gender lens on precarious work, asking how do race, gender, and educational attainment shape exposure to insecure work. Historically, Blacks pursued education to mitigate against labor market discrimination with uneven success. Education has traditionally protected against exposure to precarious employment, but this association has weakened in recent years and the persistence of differential returns to human capital suggests that the relationship between education and insecure work may be racially contingent. We assess risk of exposure to precarious nonstandard work for racial and gender groups from 1979 to 2015 using data drawn from the CPS-MORG. We find that education is not equally protective across demographic groups and over time, contributing to inequality in access to stable, standard employment.

Less than 15 per cent of people starting opiate substitution treatment (OST) in England are employed, but few gain employment during treatment. Increasingly punitive approaches have been tried to encourage individuals with substance dependence into employment in the hope of facilitating recovery. It is not clear which factors are associated with the successful maintenance of employment whilst receiving OST, and whether this group can be said to be “in recovery”. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A cross-sectional study of the OST population in one English region was conducted between January and April 2017. Measures of physical health, employment patterns, drug use, mental health, recovery capital, and dependence severity were administered to 55 employed and 55 unemployed clients.

Those in employment had higher levels of “recovery capital”, better physical and mental health, fewer drug problems, and less severe dependence, despite reporting heroin use at a similar level. Three variables were significantly associated with employment: longest period of employment (OR=1.01, p=0.003); number of chronic medical conditions (OR=0.44, p=0.011); and number of days of psychological problems in the last month (OR=0.95, p=0.031).

These results suggest that abstinence may not be required in order to maintain stable employment when OST is in place. Different treatment strategies are required for clients receiving OST already in employment compared with those who are unemployed.

This is the first UK study to the author’s knowledge to focus on people receiving OST who are also in employment.

The purpose of this paper is to give an updated overview of the research on employee ownership. What does the scientific literature reveal about advantages and disadvantages? What can be learned from different models used in Italy, France, Mondragon (Spain), UK and US with many employee-owned firms in contrast to Denmark.

A structured review of the literature on employee. The paper identifies different mechanisms leading to effects on productivity, job stability, distribution, investment etc., and reviews the empirical evidence. The main barriers and drivers are identified and different models for employee ownership in Italy, France, Mondragon (Spain), UK and US are reviewed to identify potential models for a country like Denmark with few employee-owned firms.

The article gives an overview over the theoretical predictions and the main empirical evidence of the effects of employee ownership. The pros are greater employee identification with the firm and increased productivity reinforced by increased participation. Employee-owned firms have more equal distribution of wages and more stable employment, and they have greater mutual control between employees and fewer middle managers. The motivation effects may be smaller for large firms and lack of capital may lead to lower levels of investments and capital per employee.

Comprehensive and updated literature review on the effects and successful formats of employee ownership to identify models for implementation in countries with few employee-owned firms.

Using a representative survey of young persons having left full-time education in France in 1998 and interviewed in 2001 and 2005, the purpose of this paper is to examine the process of their integration into normal employment (a stable job with a standard employment contract) and the extent to which job matches are inefficient in the sense that the pay in a job is below an individual’s potential earnings. The latter are determined principally by diploma level and educational specialisation, although other forms of training and labour market experience are relevant.

A stochastic earnings frontier approach is used in order to examine workers’ ability to capture their full potential earnings in labour markets where there is inefficient job matching (due to the lack of information, discrimination, over-education or the process of integration).

The results suggest that young workers manage to obtain on average about 82 per cent of their potential earnings three years after leaving full-time education and earnings inefficiency had disappeared four years later. The results are robust to the treatment of selectivity arising from the exclusion of the unemployed in the estimation of the frontier.

The stochastic earnings frontier is a useful and appropriate tool for modelling the process of labour market integration of certain groups (young persons, migrants and the long-term unemployed) where over-education due to inefficient initial job matches occurs. Over time this situation tends to be rectified as job mobility leads to improved matching and less inefficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to show how young educated adults in the state of precarity perceive the lack of stability in their employment, life and prospects, and what influences their decision making with respect to their career.

Qualitative research on evidence from ten semi-structured in-depth interviews. The method of analysis is consensual qualitative research.

Young Russian adults in the state of precarity have little interest in stable employment, believing it imposes inadequately tight constraints in terms of work organisation, as compared to the potentially modest returns in terms of career development and professional self-actualisation. The respondents tend to choose work which corresponds to the rhythm of their lives and preferences. They are willing to sacrifice stability and higher income in the hope of achieving career success and financial prosperity in the future. They do not hope for or expect assistance from the state but feel fully responsible for their own lives. The downside of this optimism is the lack of long-term plans and, hence, the uncertainty of the future.

The authors not only consider the state of precarity as an effect of structural factors such as the state of the labour market, but also aim to show the role of the worker’s agency in creating such a situation. Instead of the conventional view of precarious individuals solely as victims of circumstances, this study suggests to regard them as actors whose experience, goals and aspirations determine career and life choices.

Research on employee ownership has focused on questions of productivity, profitability, and employee attitudes and behavior, while there has been little attention to the most basic measure of performance: survival of the company. This study uses data on all U.S. public companies as of 1988, following them through 2001 to examine how employee ownership is related to survival. Estimation using Weibull survival models shows that companies with employee ownership stakes of 5% or more were only 76% as likely as firms without employee ownership to disappear in this period, compared both to all other public companies and to a closely matched sample without employee ownership. While employee ownership is associated with higher productivity, the greater survival rate of these companies is not explained by higher productivity, financial strength, or compensation flexibility. Rather, the higher survival is linked to their greater employment stability, suggesting that employee ownership companies may provide greater employment security as part of an effort to build a more cooperative culture, which can increase employee commitment, training, and willingness to make adjustments when economic difficulties occur. These results indicate that employee ownership may have an important role to play in increasing job and income security, and decreasing levels of unemployment. Given the fundamental importance of these issues for economic well being, further research on the role of employee ownership would be especially valuable.

This article contributes to the debate on how social policies and labour market regulation have been used to limit the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic by focusing on one specific economic segment of European labour markets: private consumption services, such as trade, tourism, catering and other support services.

The analysis combines mixed methods and a variety of sources. First, we built a set of indicators from the EU-LFS microdata for 2019 and the 2018 Eurostat “Structure of earnings survey” and performed a cluster analysis (k-means) on the dimensions and indicators considered. Second, we elaborated EU-LFS data covering 2019 and 2020 (by quarter) and OECD 2020 data, and finally we traced Covid-related policy reforms for the period March 2020–December 2021 and analysed documents and information collected in different policy repositories.

The paper shows the relevance and characteristics of private consumption services in different countries, demonstrating that so-called labour market “outsiders” are highly represented in this sector and illustrates the policies adopted to respond to the pandemic in different European countries. The paper asks whether this emergency has been a window of opportunity to redefine regulation in this sector, making it more inclusive. It demonstrates, however, that the common approach in Europe has been dominated by temporary, short-term and one-off measures, which do not represent major changes to the social security schemes that were in place before the pandemic.

This article builds on the literature on labour market dualization, but approaches the concept from a different perspective – one not centred on the nature of employment relations (stable/unstable) but on economic sectors/branches. This article does not, therefore, discuss in general terms what happened to labour market outsiders during the pandemic, but rather focus attention on a specific group of workers who are highly exposed to risks stemming from dualization: those employed in the private consumption services. The economic sector perspective is an integrative way of framing dualization which is still under-researched.