The pandemic of Covid-19 exposed critical gaps in social policy and underscored the foundational role of families and households in both societal and economic stability. This introductory chapter to a Special Issue explores the interdependence between formal economic participation and unpaid domestic labour – collectively referred to as ‘social reproduction’. Drawing on feminist political economy, the chapter addresses how gendered and undervalued reproductive labour is essential to economic growth and the realisation of international commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly gender equality and inclusive growth. This Special Issue uses South Korea as a comparative case study due to its unique economic trajectory, rapid demographic ageing, stark gender inequalities, and limited social protection systems. The country’s long working hours, low fertility rate, and pronounced wage and care burdens on women illustrate how inadequate social reproduction support can threaten broader social and economic sustainability. The pandemic further intensified these issues, disrupting institutional supports and deepening inequalities. This Special Issue collectively examines how policies across different contexts either alleviate or exacerbate the tensions between productive and reproductive labour, using South Korea as a focal point for comparison. This comparative analysis highlights the need for structural reforms and cultural change to support effective social reproduction policies, emphasising that gender-equal leave, accessible childcare, and shared caregiving responsibilities are crucial for work-family balance and social well-being. South Korea’s experience illustrates both progress and ongoing challenges, offering valuable lessons on the limitations of market-driven approaches and the importance of resilient, state-supported family policies.

The global health crisis prompted Arabian Gulf states to implement extensive social protection measures to address public health and economic challenges. This study critically examines welfare reforms enacted by six Gulf countries – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman – through the theoretical lenses of Welfare Regime Theory and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Initially, governments temporarily expanded exclusion-based welfare systems, primarily benefiting citizens, to support broader populations, including migrant workers. However, the long-term sustainability of these expansions remains uncertain. The findings suggest that although the crisis created a temporary policy window for welfare expansion, there was no fundamental reconfiguration of these exclusionary welfare regimes. This study enhances the understanding of the adaptability of Gulf welfare states during global crises and the potential for future policy shifts.

When observed in comparative perspective, until the early-1990s the Italian welfare state was clearly an outlier, characterized by an unbalanced allocation of resources among welfare sectors (so-called functional distortion) and towards social groups (distributive distortion). Since then, however, profound transformations have affected both the institutional architecture and the distributive profile of the Italian welfare state. Through an in-depth reconstruction of three decades of welfare reforms in Italy, this article shows how retrenchment and regulatory reforms in pension and labour market policies in an earlier phase (1992–2015), combined with the rather unexpected ‘expansionary turn’ in family and anti-poverty policies in more recent times (2016–2022), have partly reduced the comparative imbalances of the Italian welfare state, making it less of an outlier than in previous decades. To understand such puzzling developments, it relies on an explanatory framework centred on the interplay between socio-political demand and political supply, showing how the emergence of new coalitions, which for the first time mobilized latent social needs, combined with the reshuffling of the party system and the electoral success of parties challenging the austerity paradigm, quite unexpectedly contributed to make the Italian welfare state now look more ‘mainstream’ than in the past.

This study aims to examine the impact of the Hukou system, a labour mobility-restricting institution, on the decision to engage in non-agricultural self-employment in China, reflecting the dynamic process of labour transition from contractual work to self-employment within the country’s evolving labour market. By using the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) dataset, the results show that urban migrants, who own rural Hukou but migrate to large cities, are more likely to turn to self-employment than local citizens conditional on individual characteristics. Taking advantage of the 2014 Hukou reform, we provide supporting evidence that Hukou discrimination is a key factor in explaining the higher self-employment rate among representative urban migrants. Further heterogeneous analysis suggests that low-income migrants experience greater constraints imposed by the Hukou system, while high-income level migrants are more likely to turn to self-employment voluntarily.

Latin America was one of the regions hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to assess the evolution of family income inequality and its components from the onset of the pandemic to the end of 2021 in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru and Uruguay. The unequalising impact of the worsening of the labour market during the contraction period was associated with the significant loss of informal jobs. This effect was partially offset by the equalising role of cash transfer policies. During the recovery period, the distributive impacts of these income sources were the opposite of those observed during the contraction period, as most countries gradually reduced or ceased these transfers while labour incomes partially rebounded. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, income inequality in most countries either remained the same or had decreased compared to 2019, even though total family incomes are still below the levels of that year.

This paper investigates how interest groups in France and Germany communicate information about Industry 4.0 technologies and approaches. Specifically, this explanatory study employs cutting-edge big-data-type tools and machine-based automatic text processing to delve into the topics, arguments, and postulates related to Industry 4.0 strategies by trade unions and employers’ organisations. The goal is to determine which of these factors have been pivotal in shaping social dialogue in France and Germany. The findings reveal that social partners in both countries are involved in similar digitalisation-related initiatives and express predominantly favourable viewpoints regarding Industry 4.0 technologies. Key themes in the dialogues of both France and Germany centre around workers’ rights, working conditions, and skills training.

Mainstream economists argue that unemployment must be tackled with ‘flexibilisation’ or ‘labour market deregulation’. The public policy application has been the principle of ‘flexicurity’, with mixed labour market outcomes and limited success. Central contributions to theoretical and empirical economics writing on unemployment issues still espouse ‘flexibilisation’ as a general approach and warn about the detrimental effects of systematic deregulation under expectations of outcomes such as lower unemployment. Departing from a review of this literature, we take a step further from the ‘flexicurity’ prescription, to follow the capabilities approach of Sen and others, and develop a concept of social capabilities–based flexicurity for a learning economy, arguing that labour market performance must be targeted in an approach that includes a strong commitment to social well-being.

Using work from home (WFH) scores obtained by matching Philippine occupations with U.S. O*NET occupations, this paper estimates that only 12.38% of all workers can WFH and 25.7% of Philippine occupations are teleworkable––mostly from the following occupational groups: professionals, clerical support workers, and technicians and associate professionals. The education, real estate and, professional, scientific and technical sectors account for the largest share of teleworkable jobs. Those workers belonging to lower per capita income deciles, who are male, who have lower levels of education, who are self-employed, aged 55 and older, and who are working in sectors such as agriculture and retail, are also less likely to be in teleworkable occupations.

Understanding the distributional impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the labour market and ultimately on the living standards of the population is key to designing adequate policy responses to shield individuals’ and families’ livelihoods. This article illustrates the impact of COVID-19 on the labour market as well as on living standards in the case of a small open economy: Mauritius. We present descriptive evidence based on a unique set of telephone household surveys, representative of the Mauritian population, conducted between May 2020 and March 2021. We find that women had a higher risk of losing their job and leaving the labour force, reversing a decade-long trend of increasing labour force participation. Low-skill workers in sectors that depend on global demand – and even more so if employed informally – together with women were more likely to be affected by the crisis. One in three households reported a loss in income since the start of the pandemic, and the probability of experiencing this shock increases with the number of household members who lost their job and who were employed informally. From a policy perspective, our findings underscore the negative distributional consequences of the pandemic and provide substantive evidence for the viability of a further proactive policy stance to shield the livelihoods of vulnerable households during the economic recovery phase.

This article analyses from a Keynesian approach the effect of wage devaluation on the Spanish labour market during the Great Recession post-2008. It challenges the pro-flexibility literature, which attributes to labour relations reforms the prevention of larger job destruction in the recession and a larger reduction in unemployment during the subsequent expansion. Instead, we examine the role of wage devaluation in the operation of Okun’s law and gross domestic product, using an extended version of the Bhaduri–Marglin model. We find that wage devaluation has not significantly modified Okun’s law and that through its impact on income distribution, the unemployment rate rose by 1.9 percentage points. We therefore provide evidence for the negative effect of wage devaluation on gross domestic product and the positive effect on the unemployment rate.

There is a substantial body of research that recognises the importance of analysing regional characteristics in employment and labour relations that occur in a given geographical context. However, this phenomenon has been scarcely studied from a spatial approach. This article uses a spatio-temporal panel data model to examine the spatial interactions between the gender employment gap and, some labour and socioeconomic characteristics of 727 municipalities of Andalusia, Spain, for the period 2012–2016. The results show that due to spatial diffusion mechanisms, a spatial spillover effect occurs in both the gender gap in employment and in some of the labour and socioeconomic characteristics considered. These findings may be extended to other geographic areas and can be of use for the implementation of regional policies aimed at narrowing the gender employment gap.

There has been an explosion of interest in the “four-day-week” movement across the globe, especially due to its potential in addressing many of the societal challenges left by the COVID-19 pandemic. Four-day-week is a movement set to shorten the working hours of full-time workers without a reduction in pay. I aim to set out the case for a national move towards a four-day-week explaining why social policy scholars should lead the debate. First, I provide evidence of the societal costs that the current long-hours work culture has on workers’ and their family’s well-being and welfare, social inequality, and social cohesion. Shorter working can help tackle these issues by giving workers right to time, shifting the balance between work and non-work activities in our lives and valuing them both. Social policy scholars need to lead this debate owing to our existing knowledge and expertise in dealing with these social issues and state-level interventions. In addition, without pressing for fundamental changes in our labour market, we cannot adequately address some of the key challenges we face as a society. The paper ends with key research questions social policy scholars should address as a part of this move.

Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain went several times to the polls during the 2010–2019 decade. It was a period characterised by the strenuous effort to recover the economic situation before the onset of the Great Recession; an effort, however, often constrained by externally imposed austerity policies, and by a refugee crisis that contributed to the growing salience of the immigration issue. The article adopts an original sub-national approach to examine if and how the economic situation and the incidence of immigration affected the electoral outcomes in the four South-European countries. Adopting a theory of retrospective behaviour, the research reported in the article confirms the association between employment and immigration levels, on the one hand, and punishment of the incumbent government on the other. However, the electoral effects of immigration are conditioned by the partisan composition of the government and, under centre-right cabinets, are aggravated by a negative economic conjuncture.