ABSTRACT
Significant changes in employment patterns across developed, emerging, and developing economies have occurred in the past few decades. Employment arrangements have become more diverse, and many arrangements sever workers from access to social protection through employment. These trends raise the importance of the application of the definition of informal employment, across all economies, developed as well as developing ones. Cross-national measurement is needed to monitor consequences for workers and to inform global policy discussions.
Developed countries have experienced the growth of work arrangements akin to informal employment. A significant contributor has been the growth of non-standard work arrangements among wage workers. Fixed-term, temporary, casual, intermittent and other similar work arrangements have grown over the past four decades in European and North American countries in particular but also in other regions. More recently, work arrangements that blur the boundary between employee/dependent status and self-employment/independent status have grown. These workers, while treated by policy as self-employed/independent, often lack the autonomy to make decisions about how to engage with the market. The chapter highlights how these patterns are shared with developing economies. It reviews significant progress in international statistics to keep track of these changes, noting the new category of “dependent contractors” to classify workers in-between dependent and independent employment and sub-categories for non-standard wage work.
