Labour Participation of People Living with HIV/AIDS

The therapeutic advances that have taken place since the mid 1990s have profoundly affected the situation of people living with HIV/AIDS, not only in terms of life expectancy and quality of life but also socio-economically. This has numerous effects on different aspects of the patients’ lives and, especially, on their working lives. We analyze in this paper labour force participation of people living with HIV/AIDS in Spain. Although we first set up our model in a typical neoclassical framework where variables of defence levels, illness stage and patients health related quality of life are added to the normally used demographic and economic variables, we depart from it at several points of the paper. The results point to a high level of labour participation, although lower than the level at the time of the diagnosis, associated with a good health status. Gender, education level, unearned income, clinical indicators and the patients’ own perception of their health are the main variables explaining the probability of participating in the labour market. The results obtained in the study may serve both as a basis for making medium term predictions and for designing integral support policies for these people.