Employmentweb_low

eMployMent relations and health inequalities: pathways and MechanisMs
countries, showing negative relationships between labour market
inequality and male and female hales. These r 2 values of around
0.5 provide some macro-social evidence for using labour market
inequalities to understand the population health impact of
employment relations at the national level.
in conclusion, while labour institution indicators (i.e., union
density) are scarcely recorded in peripheral countries, labour
market inequalities correlate significantly with health outcomes. in
semi-peripheral countries, labour market inequalities are
significantly associated with a range of health outcomes. however, a
large informal sector in these countries does not necessarily mean
worse population health (data not shown). This could be due to a
large presence of small entrepreneurs in addition to workers in the
informal sector. some studies have also found evidence that labour
institutions in wealthy countries are associated with population
health indicators (navarro & shi, 2001; Muntaner et al., 2002;
navarro et al., 2003; chung & Muntaner, 2006; 2007). Taken
together, these associations constitute a body of evidence that
suggests the effects of employment relations on population health
(e.g., rose, 1992; susser, 1994; schwartz, 1994).
an alternative approach to the above is to ascertain the extento
to which employment conditions vary across countries and whether
some welfare regimes bring about more salutary employment and
working conditions. Grouping countries into clusters of
homogeneous labour market characteristics can be an efficient way
to summarise global variation in employment conditions. Thus, we
divided countries into three groups according to their position in the
world system, using an analytical tool based on national incomes
(Babones, 2005). next, using data from the ilo’s KilM dataset and
the World health organization (years 2000 and 2004), we conducted
cluster analyses of middle- and low-income countries.
for core (wealthy) countries, we used oecd data to generate
labour market clusters. core countries yielded 3 clusters based on
unionisation rates, on a logarithmic scale, and an employment
protection legislation index. The resulting clusters largely
correspond with esping-andersen's welfare state regime types.
countries in the social democratic cluster (see figure a5, in section
2 in the appendices) showed distinctively higher unionisation rates
compared to the corporatist and liberal clusters. What separates
corporatist countries from liberal countries is the level of
employment protection: the former exhibit stronger labour
protection for both full-time and temporary workers compared to
the latter.
207