SMARTer indicators for decent work in a post-2015 development agenda: A proposal

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the design of a post‐ 2015 development framework by proposing indicators to monitor employment outcomes. Our analysis of the current MDG employment indicators shows that measurement prob‐ lems, the inappropriate use of aggregate statistics, ambiguous interpretability, and as‐ sumptions that often do not hold true in the context of developing countries are major shortcomings of the current indicators. Based on this critique, we develop a new set of in‐ dicators for productive employment and decent work. We propose four indicators: (i) the growth of labor value added per worker, (ii) the working poverty rate, (iii) (a) the share of workers receiving less than an absolute labor income and (b) the share of workers receiv‐ ing less than 60 percent of the median labor income. We demonstrate the empirical appli‐ cation of these indicators using the country cases of Uganda and Peru.