Disability and the labour market: conditioning factors for the inactive population with intellectual disabilities

Abstract

The majority of studies about disability and the labour market tend to treat disabled people as a homogeneous group, without considering that their behaviour differs based on certain variables such as typology and degree of disability, education level, gender or age, particularly among those with intellectual disabilities. For this reason, the objective of this study is to analyse the relationship between employment inactivity among people with intellectual disabilities in Spain, and the principal conditioning factors for their entry into the labour market, in order to determine whether they differ from those affecting people with other types of disability. Employment opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities were found to be mainly affected by their education level, followed by their degree of disability and their gender. The educational level variable had the strongest impact: the higher the educational level, the greater the presence in the labour market. However, almost a third of the population with intellectual disabilities in Spain are illiterate and have no formal education, which means that they have a residual role in the labour market.