Global Job Quality : Evidence from Wage Employment across Developing Countries

Measuring job quality across countries has been challenging and has relied typically on asingle indicator, such as formality or wages. To contribute to this critical policy issue, this paper presents a firstglobal estimate of job quality departing from microdata. It assembles a harmonized global data set of labor force andhousehold surveys to produce a measure of job quality across four dimensions: sufficient income, access to employmentbenefits, job stability, and adequate working conditions. The results for 40 developing countries show significantvariation in job quality across countries, economic sectors, and sociodemographic characteristics, including age,location, and educational attainment. Countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean region have relatively higherlevels of job quality, while countries in Sub-Saharan Africa display the lowest levels of job quality. Most workers inthe sectors of finance and business services, public administration, and utilities have, on average, better jobs.Higher education matters in securing greater job quality, while the average job quality of wage employment isrelatively similar between men and women but with some variation in income and working conditions.