Increasing the employment of people with disability

Despite sustained policy attention across the EU and OECD, labour market outcomes for persons with disability remain poor. Employment rates for people with disability continue to lag significantly behind those of persons without disability, with a gap exceeding 20 percentage points in the EU in 2022. While modest improvements have been observed in the post‑COVID recovery period, the inclusion of people with disability is limited by structural barriers and shortcomings in existing policy frameworks and their implementation.

The objective of this project is to help build the evidence base regarding the benefits, opportunities and challenges related to increasing the employment of persons with disability. Specifically, the project aims to:

• Measure the potential economic impact of higher employment, examining how these effects differ across age and gender as well as addressing questions such as the potential for increasing the employment rates through higher rates of educational attainment.
• Conduct cross-country comparisons of disability policies, systematically examining where countries stand in terms of compensation and integration policies by developing country-specific indicators. These indicators can be used to draw cross-country comparisons across dimensions such as financial incentives and benefit eligibility criteria, and can be used to track disability policy reforms across countries.
• Provide a deeper understanding of pathways into disability, by examining the sequence of labour market events preceding the onset of disability across countries.
• Support evidence-informed policymaking in the field of disability policies, by compiling and synthesise evidence from existing rigorous evaluations to assess the relative effectiveness of disability-related labour market policies. It also aims to identify gaps in the knowledge base and explore the feasibility of using linked administrative data for future evaluations.

The project also aims to promote peer learning across EU and OECD countries on the topics covered through the dissemination of written outputs as well as the organisation of a networking and knowledge exchange event.