Subjective employment insecurity around the world

Abstract

I consider the concept of employment insecurity (EI) and provide new evidence for 1997 and 2005 for many countries with widely differing institutional contexts and at varying stages of development. There are no grounds for accepting that workplaces were going through a sea change in EI. Workers in transitional economies and developing economies worried the most about insecurity. Insecurity tended to be greater for women, for less-educated and for older workers. However, these patterns vary across country groups, in ways that are only sometimes explicable in terms of their known institutional characteristics. In general, subjective EI tracks the unemployment rate.