Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion presents “profiles” or “portraits” of individuals who have no, or limited, labor-market attachment. The profiles are derived from surveys and focus on those who define themselves as unemployed, retired or inactive.

The portraits also attach stories to statistics. They identify distinct groups of individuals who are the potential clients of income- and employment-support policies, by examining detailed labor market, demographic and social circumstances. The analysis is a pragmatic way of looking at individuals through the lenses of both poverty/welfare status and labor market indicators. In a sense, it combines labor market analysis and poverty profiling.

The report takes a comprehensive view of policy making, focusing on both the labor market attachment of a country’s out-of-work population and the social assistance package and poverty profile of the same segment of the population.

Through this examination of the characteristics of different subgroups, the analysis aims to contribute policy-relevant information about the social and economic risks these subgroups are facing, and on the barriers that hold back their labor market integration.

In doing so, it can facilitate effective formulation and targeting of policies that seek to alleviate these barriers. In this sense, the portraits help move the dialogue on activation from a labor market-centric view to a broader dialogue that includes social policy as a whole.



This is an important shift; for instance, social protection programs, such as family benefits and maternity benefits, and broader social policy issues such as retirement ages, often have a great impact on who remains inactive. By creating a space for dialogue between citizens and between different public organizations (social, labor, health, child care, etc.), analyses such as Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion take additional steps toward more successful labor market inclusion of citizens.

Specifically, the report presents portraits of the out-of-work population of six countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania and Romania) in terms of distance from the labor market, human capital, and labor supply conditions, as well as demographic conditions.

The analysis relies on the European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) surveys for the years 2007 to 2011. Latent class analysis methodology allows multidimensional profiling of the out-of-work population, and identifies classes or groups of out-of-work individuals that are as homogeneous as possible within each class according to a set of observable characteristics, and as distant as possible between classes.

Consequently, this analysis provide a much richer glimpse of the very different barriers to labor market integration that these various groups experience, considerably augmenting the limited amount of information contained in traditional descriptive statistics.

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Brochure: Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion Read online on Issuu

Country Notes Read online on Issuu

Authors: Ramya Sundaram, Ulrich Hoerning, Natasha De Andrade Falcao, Natalia Millan, Carla Tokman, and Michele Zini.

Cover photograph by Dominic Chavez/World Bank (2013).