Documents Miranda, Veerle 2 results

"Mental ill-health can lead to poor work performance, high sickness absence and reduced labour market participation, resulting in considerable costs for society. Improving labour market participation of people with mental health problems requires well-integrated policies and services across the education, employment, health and social sectors. This paper provides examples of policy initiatives from 10 OECD countries for integrated services. Outcomes and strengths and weaknesses of the policy initiatives are presented, resulting in the following main conclusions for future integrated mental health and work policies and services: More rigorous implementation and evaluation of integrated policies is necessary to improve labour market outcomes. Implementation cannot be left to the discretion of stakeholders only; Better financial incentives and clearer obligations and guidelines need to be provided to stakeholders and professionals to participate in integrated service delivery; Each sector has a responsibility to assure integrated services in line with client needs, in turn requiring much better knowledge about the needs of clients with a mental illness; More integrated provision of services within each sector – e.g. through employment advice brought into the mental health system and psychological expertise brought into employment services – appears to be the easiest and most cost-effective approach."

"Household production constitutes an important aspect of economic activity and ignoring it may lead to incorrect inferences about levels and changes in well-being. This paper sheds light on the importance of unpaid work by making use of detailed time-use surveys for 25 OECD member countries and 3 emerging economies. The calculations suggest that between one-third and half of all valuable economic activity in the countries under consideration is not accounted for in the traditional measures of well-being, such as GDP per capita. In all countries, women do more of such work than men, although to some degree balanced – by an amount varying across countries – by the fact that they do less market work. While unpaid work – and especially the gender division of unpaid work – is to some extent related to a country's development level, country cross-sectional data suggest that demographic factors and public policies tend to exercise a much larger impact. The regular collection of time-use data can thus be of tremendous value for government agencies to monitor and design public policies, and give a more balanced view of well-being across different societies."