This visual essay provides an overview of the progress made towards decent work in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
This slideshow presents the main results of a study based on ILO’s global estimates of employment by economic class (including the working poverty rate) featured in our latest issue of Spotlight on Work Statistics.
This topic page on the working poor provides access to statistical information including data, methods, and publications.
This issue of ILOSTAT’s Spotlight on work statistics focuses on employed people living in extreme poverty around the world. Using ILO’s global estimates of employment by economic class, it shows the great progress achieved during the last few decades in reducing working poverty in the world, and how more effort is still needed to completely eradicate it, particularly considering the strong regional disparities.
Discover the methods behind the ILO’s modelled estimates on labour force statistics (including the working poor), labour productivity, wage growth and labour migration.
Get labour statistics from our comprehensive database with a tool that works for you. All tools provide free and open access to our data.
This paper introduces a model for generating national estimates and projections of the distribution of the employed across five economic classes for 142 developing countries over the period 1991 to 2017. The national estimates are used to produce aggregate estimates of employment by economic class for eight developing regions and for the developing world as a whole. We estimate that 41.6 per cent of the developing world’s workers were middle class and above in 2011, more than double the share in 1991. Yet, regional figures show that widespread poverty and vulnerability to poverty persists in many developing regions. Further growth in the developing world’s middle class, which both reflects and supports broader economic development, will require increased productivity levels and an expansion in the number of quality jobs.
