Employment is a key driver of social and economic development. It is also at the centre of most people's lives and the quality of an individual's employment is an important element of his or her well-being. At the same time, labour markets are evolving and the conditions of employment are continuously changing, which affects the lives of workers and their households. This development has been accompanied by growing interest in quality of employment and demands from policymakers, governments and researchers for more systematic information on the quality of employment to complement the well-established quantitative labour market indicators. The Framework offers a coherent structure for measuring quality of employment and provides practical guidance for compiling and interpreting a number of proposed indicators.

This manual describes a new methodology to measure a decent but basic standard of living in different countries and how much workers need to earn to afford this, making it possible for researchers to estimate comparable living wages around the world and determine gaps between living wages and prevailing wages, even in countries with limited secondary data.

This volume seeks to go beyond the microeconomic view of wages as a cost having negative consequences on a given firm, to consider the positive macroeconomic dynamics associated with wages as a major component of aggregate demand.

Measuring job quality across countries has been challenging and has relied typically on a single indicator, such as formality or wages. To contribute to this critical policy issue, this paper presents a first global estimate of job quality departing from microdata. It assembles a harmonized global data set of labor force and household surveys to produce a measure of job quality across four dimensions: sufficient income, access to employment benefits, job stability, and adequate working conditions. The results for 40 developing countries show significant variation in job quality across countries, economic sectors, and sociodemographic characteristics, including age, location, and educational attainment. Countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean region have relatively higher levels of job quality, while countries in Sub-Saharan Africa display the lowest levels of job quality. Most workers in the sectors of finance and business services, public administration, and utilities have, on average, better jobs. Higher education matters in securing greater job quality, while the average job quality of wage employment is relatively similar between men and women but with some variation in income and working conditions.