Abstract
BackgroundInternational 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.MethodsFor 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.ConclusionsThere 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).
Highlights
International comparisons of the disability employment gap are an important driver of policy change.previous comparisons have used the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), despite known comparability issues
There is a need for investment in disability measures that are more comparable over time/space
Countries’ rankings in the disability employment gap across the different surveys in 2011/12 is shown in columns 2–4 of Table 1 below. (Rankings are used for ease of comparability across surveys, but the estimates themselves are given in Additional file 1: Appendix Table A1)
Summary
This paper primarily focuses on waves 1–7 of ESS [23,24,25,26,27,28,29], which makes the strongest efforts to achieve comparability of any repeated cross-national survey [30]. For the purposes of comparison, we use EU-SILC and the 2011 ad-hoc module of the EU-LFS. Both surveys are multi-wave rotating panel designs that are governed by EU Regulations (EU-SILC by 1983/2003, EU-LFS by 317/2010) that specify minimum requirements, but allow some latitude in wording and methodology. The same issues arise in the EU-LFS (e.g. proxy interviews range from >50% in Slovenia to zero in Belgium) [31]. For both EU-SILC and EU LFS, no consistent information is available on response rates. Multilevel models in Additional file 1: Appendix A3 again give similar results
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