Scoping Review: Preliminary findings

Addressing inequalities in the World of Work

The data sample

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Figure 1: Sample sorting process through identification and screening
  • strongest focus on income inequality (vertical), with many horizontal inequality studies including aspect of income inequality
  • horizontal inequalities: strongest focus on income - gender inequalities (horizontal)
  • interventions:
    • strongest research base on labour rights protection interventions
    • second on infrastructural interventions
    • third on agency-strengthening ones: training, financial access, education programmes
  • formalization & social protection research rarely goes into inequality outcomes beyond ‘income’ effects; most excluded for that reason

Figure 2: Overall inequality types in sample

Preliminary findings

Figure 3: Finished and projected inequality types
  • interventions most strongly target gender-income divide
    • most studies here recommend further scale-integration between agency/structural approaches
    • most studies also only focus on analysing a single scale however
  • interventions often have intersectional impacts even if not targeted at them
    • most visible for institutional/structural interventions and spatial inequalities
    • studies analysing intersectional inequalities near unanimously recommend intersectional targeting
  • individual agency-based interventions (training, subsidies, maternity benefits, transfers, microcredit, etc):
    • seem most effective for targeting WoW outcomes of disability inequalities
    • seem marginally effective for targeting WoW outcomes of gender inequalities
    • require additional mediating scales for other inequalities
  • more structural interventions (education, infrastructural, ubi, trade liberalization, collective action):
    • seem most effective for spatial, income, education-generational inequalities
    • often show longer-term impacts, requiring longer periods of analyses
    • can work without additional agency-based interventions, few studies analyse both at same time

Preliminary limitations

Figure 4: Finished and projected intervention types
  • stronger institutional-structural research focus in developed countries, with more structural-agency based in developing countries
  • employment creation as a category is often subsumed in other structural/institutional analyses
  • little evidence-based research on effect of interventions targeting education on world of work outcomes
  • spatial inequality most evenly geographically spread evidence base
  • empirical base on interventions targeting disability inequalities strongly restricted on developed countries, especially United States

Figure 5: Country spread