This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The book investigates the trends in earnings inequalities in developing countries to determine the main drivers. Particular attention is paid to extending the most conventional explanations of changes in earnings inequality, based on the relative abundance of skilled and unskilled labour, with recent theories that put the nature of tasks performed by workers in their jobs, rather than their skills, at the centre of the analysis. The latter approach has helped to explain relevant patterns recently observed in the trends in earnings inequality in the US and other industrialized countries. Developed countries have experienced a polarization in earnings and in employment, namely stronger growth in the earnings and jobs for the most and least skilled workers at the expense of those in the middle. This pattern has been attributed to differences in tasks-whether a given job is routine and can be automated or offshored-rather than skills, and has reduced employment and incomes in typical middle-class jobs in manufacturing and services. However, this narrative has been developed in the context of mature industrialized economies on the frontier of technological change that have also seen a large set of activities offshored to emergent economies. Evidence for developing countries, however, is still scarce and faces bigger challenges, both conceptual, and in terms of gathering the necessary data on earnings and task content of jobs. This book presents the main results of the UNU-WIDER project, The Changing Nature of Work and Inequality, aiming to fill this knowledge gap.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Based on studies of a range of countries in the Global South, this book examines heterogeneity within informal work by applying a common conceptual framework and empirical methodology. The country studies use panel data to study the dynamics of worker transitions between formal and heterogeneous informal work and present a comparative perspective across developing countries in Asia, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and North Africa and the Middle East. Each study provides a nuanced view of informality, dividing workers into six work statuses: formal wage-employees, upper-tier informal wage-employees, lower-tier informal wage employees, formal self-employed, and upper-tier informal self-employed. Based on this common conceptual framework, the country studies examine the distribution of workers across each of these work statuses, and document transition patterns across different formality and work statuses. The panel data analysed in each country study provide a basis for making statements about labour market transitions that are not warranted when using comparable cross-sections. The studies also examine the individual- and household-level characteristics associated with workers in each work status. Using these characteristics, each study constructs a 'job ladder' that ranks each work status, and then examines the characteristics of workers that are associated with transitions up (and down) the job ladder.