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. 2017 Dec 2;17(1):928.
doi: 10.1186/s12889-017-4938-8.

Success and failure in narrowing the disability employment gap: comparing levels and trends across Europe 2002-2014

Ben Baumberg Geiger  1 , Kjetil A van der Wel  2 , Anne Grete Tøge  3
Affiliations

Success and failure in narrowing the disability employment gap: comparing levels and trends across Europe 2002-2014

Ben Baumberg Geiger et al. BMC Public Health. .

Abstract

Background: International comparisons of the disability employment gap are an important driver of policy change. However, previous comparisons have used the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), despite known comparability issues. We present new results from the higher-quality European Social Survey (ESS), compare these to EU-SILC and the EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS), and also examine trends in the disability employment gap in Europe over the financial crisis for the first time.

Methods: For cross-sectional comparisons of 25 countries, we use micro-data for ESS and EU-SILC for 2012 and compare these to published EU-LFS 2011 estimates. For trend analyses, we use seven biannual waves of ESS (2002-2014) with a total sample size of 182,195, and annual waves of EU-SILC (2004-2014) with a total sample size of 2,412,791.

Results: (i) Cross-sectional: countries that have smaller disability employment gaps in one survey tend to have smaller gaps in the other surveys. Nevertheless, there are some countries that perform badly on the lower-quality surveys but better in the higher-quality ESS. (ii) Trends: the disability employment gap appears to have declined in ESS by 4.9%, while no trend is observed in EU-SILC - but this has come alongside a rise in disability in ESS.

Conclusions: There is a need for investment in disability measures that are more comparable over time/space. Nevertheless, it is clear to policymakers there are some countries that do consistently well across surveys and measures (Switzerland), and others that do badly (Hungary).

Keywords: Employment [N01.824.245]; Europe [Z01.542]; Policy [I01.655]; disability.

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Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable (this paper uses secondary data; ethics approval & consent were obtained by the original EU-SILC & ESS survey teams).

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Disability employment gaps across Europe in ESS (2002–2014, left panel) and EU-SILC (2004–2014, right panel)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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MeSH terms