The future of labour segmentation after Covid-19

Labour segmentation in national markets roughly operates through two porous borders, separating jobs into sectors-formal vs. informal ones-and into status-selfemployed vs. paid employed, but characterized by a lot of overlapping. It results from the process of job creation, determined partly by labor-saving innovations in production and globalization. The chapter is an essay to describe how the pandemic interacts with these two factors to potentially reshape the allocation of jobs between informal self-employment and formal paid employment or other possible combinations. The main findings is that the impact of these interactions is highly unclear on the medium or long-term trend of labor. As selfemployment has been an answer in most countries to the job shortage in the prevalent informal form, the pandemic by reducing total employment in the short run first destroys lowpaid employment but without challenging the current trajectory of employment along segmentation-low job creation driven by higher digitalization.