What Works: Promoting Pathways to Decent Work

Both temporary and structural barriers limit access to decent work in emerging and developing countries, negatively impacting on the lives of millions of vulnerable workers and their families. As global forces transform the world of work, governments in these countries are adopting various combinations of policies to deal with current and future challenges. This report, issued in the Studies on Growth with Equity series, looks at how income support and active labour market policies (ALMPs) can be combined as part of an integrated approach in order to promote pathways to decent work for all. To that end, the report first provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of the effects that such policy combinations have on individual and aggregate labour market outcomes. An innovative country mapping of integrated approaches is then presented, together with the findings from a literature review and a global macroeconomic study. The analysis is complemented with evidence from impact evaluations of two programmes in Mauritius and Uruguay that have combined income support and active support in different and novel ways. The report shows that approaches exploiting the complementarity between ALMPs and income support are effective in improving the labour market perspectives of vulnerable workers while protecting them throughout working-life transitions. The success of such approaches depends on certain design and implementation features, including a transparent and inclusive governance system, appropriate targeting to ensure the participation of those in greatest need, sufficient engagement of beneficiaries in the activation components, and strong linkages between the policies so combined.