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In North American, European Union, and otherOECD countries, available evidence suggeststhat non-standard employment is on the rise.The term ‘non-standard work’ as commonly used,includes: a) jobs entailing an employment arrangementthat diverges from regular, year-round,full-time employment with a single employer butwithout security; and b) self-employment, withor without employees. (Carré and Herranz 2002.)The common categories of non-standard wagework are temporary, fixed-term and part-time.Increasingly, inter-firm sub-contracted work inthe service sector (for example, janitorial servicesand home care) and the manufacturing sector(garment making, electronic assembly) is alsoincluded.What follows is a brief summary of trends in threecategories of non-standard work — part-timework, temporary work, and self-employment — inEurope, including differences by sex. (Carré andHerranz 2002, Carré 2006.)Part-Time Work: Since the early 1970s, therehas been a marked growth in the proportion ofpart-time workers in total employment. By 1998,part-time workers accounted for 16 percent oftotal employment in EU countries and 14 percentof total employment in OECD countries.Temporary Employment: For the EU as a whole,and in a majority of EU nations, the share ofworkers in temporary employment, including bothdirect hire and agency hire, increased from themid-1980s to the late 1990s. By 1998, temporaryemployment accounted for around10 percent of total employment in EU countries.Self-Employment: Self-employment, includingboth employers and own account workers, has increasedin many OECD countries over the past 25years. 26 Indeed, outside of agriculture, self-employmenthas grown at a faster rate than total employmentin 14 (out of 24) OECD countries wheredata were available. Also, as self-employment hasbeen growing, so has the share of own accountself-employment within total self-employment. Asa result, in OECD countries today, more self-employedpersons are own account workers, ratherthan employers.In addition to these common forms of non-standardwork in OECD countries, there are otherforms of non-standard work — notably, casualday labour, industrial outwork, and other forms ofsub-contracted work — for which data are not soreadily available.In sum, the purely counter-cyclical model of informalitydoes not hold. At least in the short term,countries demonstrate significant variation in theirpatterns of informalisation even under conditionsof steady economic growth. Also, different segmentsof the informal economy demonstrate substantialvariation in their cyclical patterns. Certainsegments of the informal economy expand duringdownturns in the economy: particularly survivalactivities and sub-contracted activities for firmstrying to cope with the downturn. Certain othersegments of the informal economy expand duringupturns in the economy: notably, dynamic independententerprises and sub-contracted activitieslinked to global value chains.Gendered patternsInformalisation of Labour Markets by SexThe last two decades have seen a marked increasein women’s labour force participation: most significantlyin the Americas and Western Europe andmore modestly in Sub-Saharan Africa, SoutheastAsia, and East Asia. 27 Only in two regions — EasternEurope and South Asia — has the women’slabour force participation rate actually fallen. Themarked increase in women’s labour force partici-143