How stable are jobs across countries? In the richest countries today, many workers can reasonably expect to stay in a job for years or until they no longer want to do it. In contrast, workers in poorer countries often stay in a job for single months or even weeks. Stable employment means workers are exposed to less labor market risk, reducing a large source of anxiety for many and potentially affording them the opportunity to make important long-run investments.
We know very little about the drivers of these cross-country differences. Poorer countries may have a younger workforce, suggesting few are able to accumulate long job tenures. There may, however, be fundamental economic mechanisms at play – employers and workers in poorer countries may be less successful at screening one another, leading to bad job matches and frequent turnover.
The Harmonized World Labor Force Survey (HWLFS) we develop at work-in-data allows us to measure job stability using job durations, a commonly recorded metric in many labour force surveys. In the below graphs, we report the average job duration for some subgroups of the working-age population. This allows us to explore how it differs across countries and over time and how these differences matter for people’s lives.