Understanding the Quality of Employment Dynamics. an Application for Argentina

The quality of employment is under discussion globally. On the one hand, economic growth in developed countries after the 2008 crisis led to an increase in part-time and low-income jobs. On the other hand, in developing countries the widespread labour informality and the employment in low-productivity activities are a recurring concern as they are strongly related to poverty, especially after the pandemic.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the quality of employment dynamics in Argentina considering a novel methodology which is currently being used in other Latin American countries, the QoE index. Building upon the Alkire-Foster methodology to construct multidimensional indexes, the QoE includes three dimensions: labour income, employment stability and employment conditions. A threshold is established within each indicator, and an overall cutoff is established for the index as a whole to calculate levels of deprivation.

The index provides a useful tool to inform public policy, since it allows the identification of different profiles of vulnerable workers, as well as the intensity of their deprivations. Finally, when using panel data, changes in QoE can be decomposed to identify the groups and dimensions that explain them.

Data used in this paper comes from the Permanent Household Survey (EPH) of Argentina. For this paper, we use cross-section data from 2004 to 2024 and a panel of one and a half years, to understand changes in the quality of employment.

Preliminary results are: 1) the quality of employment in Argentina improved between 2004 and 2013 and then was interrupted as the economy stagnated; 2) labour income is the dimension which contributes most to the low quality of employment; 3) there are strong differences between regions in terms of quality of employment; 4) low quality employment is more prevalent among women, low-educated workers, and those working in services or in microenterprises.