Invisible work, unseen hazards: the health of women immigrant household service workers in Spain

BACKGROUND: Household service work has been largely absent from occupational health studies. We examine the occupational hazards and health effects identified by immigrant women household service workers. METHODS: Exploratory, descriptive study of 46 documented and undocumented immigrant women in household services in Spain, using a phenomenological approach. Data were collected between September 2006 and May 2007 through focus groups and semi-structured individual interviews. Data were separated for analysis by documentation status and sorted using a mixed-generation process. In a second phase of analysis, data on psychosocial hazards were organized using the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire as a guide. RESULTS: Informants reported a number of environmental, ergonomic and psychosocial hazards and corresponding health effects. Psychosocial hazards were especially strongly present in data. Data on reported hazards were similar by documentation status and varied by several emerging categories: whether participants were primarily cleaners or carers and whether they lived in or outside of the homes of their employers. Documentation status was relevant in terms of empowerment and bargaining, but did not appear to influence work tasks or exposure to hazards directly. CONCLUSIONS: Female immigrant household service workers are exposed to a variety of health hazards that could be acted upon by improved legislation, enforcement, and preventive workplace measures, which are discussed.

Household debt and the European crisis. ECRI Research Report No. 13, June 2013

The fall in economic output all over Europe since 2008 has had important consequences for household liabilities. Major growth in demand and supply for household credit products has generated an increase in household debt, which contributed to growth rates during the pre-crisis period but – in some countries – became household-debt overhangs and helped inflate asset bubbles. In the run-up to the crisis, long-term economic lessons and theories were often overlooked and signs that the economic situation could worsen were ignored. Although not at the core of the crisis, household debt had important consequences for macroeconomic stability, robustness of growth and the depth of recessions. The last ten years in Europe have demonstrated the typical final stage of a household debt cycle: rapid increase and abrupt retrenchment. Widely varying outcomes across Europe enable us to consider the causes of the rapid growth in household debt and draw theoretical lessons that can help policy-makers and academics devise a coherent regulatory response to avoid extremes of the debt cycle in future.

The Impact of Banking Structural Reform on Household Retail Finance. ECRI Commentary No. 13, 7 October 2014

There are two main objectives behind the EC proposal on banking structural reform: the financial stability objective and the economic efficiency objective. If it is implemented, the reform should reinforce the stability and economic efficiency of household retail activities through lower contagion, better resolvability in the event of failure, more harmonised supervisory practices across the EU and more resilient household demand for retail loans. However, it could also trigger counterproductive effects that could partly undermine the expected benefits. These potential negative effects are not appropriately assessed in the impact study of the proposal published in January 2014 and will require further consideration in the coming months. In particular, the stability of household retail finance could be strengthened by placing more emphasis on bankruptcy risks of retail banks; the transfer of existing systemic activities towards less regulated and supervised markets and reputational risk. A better analysis of the borrowing costs for households (impacted by the potential decreasing diversification of the funding base of banks and scarcer liquidity) and implementation costs could help regulators to achieve the objective of efficient household activities.

Simulation of Land Use and Investment Behaviour under Different Policy Scenarios: Results of the extended farm/household model. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 27, July 2012

Factor markets are a central issue in analyses of farm development and of agricultural sector vitality. Among the different production factors, land is one of the most studied. Several studies seek to estimate the effect of government policy payments on land value or land rental prices. The studies mostly agree that government payments and other types of policy support are significant in explaining land prices and account for a large share of them. In October 2011, the European Commission published a new policy proposal for the common agricultural policy (CAP) up to 2020. The proposed regulation includes a shift from historical to regional payments. The objective of this paper is to provide an ex ante analysis of the impact of the new CAP policy instruments on the land market. In particular, the effect of the regionalisation of payments in Italy is examined. The analysis is based on the use of a mathematical programming model to simulate the changes in land demand for a farm in Emilia Romagna. The results highlight the relevance of the new policy mechanism in determining a change in land demand. Yet the effect is highly dependent on initial ownership of entitlements under the historical payment scheme.