Profit sharing with labour and giving employees in enterprises may help cut income inequality
work, improving poor households’ access to such basic social services as health, education, safe water and sanitation and providing access to such productive resources as inputs, credit and finance. These actions can also free up time spent in unpaid care work. Subsidies, targeted expenditures and pricing mechanisms are other options. • Providing complementary support. Marketing facilities, investments in physical infrastructure (particularly in rural areas), expansion of extension services and labour-intensive technologies are conducive to equalizing work opportunities. The private sector can, with the right incentives, be encouraged to play a major role in building and running physical infrastructures. • Democratizing education, particularly at the tertiary level, nationally and globally. Countries place a high premium on tertiary education, but access is unequal and can perpetuate inequalities in work, as seen within countries (most workers with a tertiary education come from higher income families) and between countries (countries with greater increases in tertiary education are industrial, with already high attainment in this segment).
• Pursuing profit sharing and employee ownership. Profit sharing with labour and giving employees shares in enterprises may help cut income inequality. • Adopting and enforcing proper distributive policies. These could include progressive taxes on income and wealth, regulations to reduce rent extraction, stricter regulation (particularly of finance) and targeted public spending on the poor. • Regulating the financial sector to reduce the regressive effects of cycles. Promoting investments in the real economy can generate secure jobs, while increases in financial investment can be less stable and produce fewer jobs. • Removing asymmetries between the mobility of labour and of capital. Labour mobility does not match capital’s given intrinsic differences. As a matter of policy, industrial countries promote capital mobility but discourage that of labour. Nonetheless, regulating capital movements can reduce macroeconomic instability and middle- income traps in developing countries, preventing capital from moving overseas when wages become too high. Migration policies can at a minimum reduce the risks of migration.
Targeted actions are needed for balancing care and paid work, making work sustainable, addressing youth unemployment, encouraging creative and voluntary work and providing work in conflict and post-conflict situations Addressing imbalances in paid and unpaid work opportunities between women and men may benefit from the following policy measures: • Expanding and strengthening gender-sensitive policies for female wage employment. Programmes should address skills development through education, particularly in math and science, training that matches market demands and access to continuing professional development. • Actions to increase representation of women in senior decisionmaking positions. Representation can be enhanced in public and private sectors through policies on human resources, selection and recruitment, 20 | HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2015
and incentives for retention. The criteria for moving men and women into senior positions should be identical. Mentoring and coaching can empower women in the workplace, for example, by using successful senior female managers as role models. • Specific interventions. Legislative measures are needed to reduce inequalities between women and men in harassment in the workplace, discrimination in hiring, access to finance and access to technology. • Focusing on maternal and paternal parental leave. Rather than pursuing a totally gender-neutral approach, if a bonus is granted to parents who share parental leave more