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The employment rates of disabled people
- Author:
- BERTHOUD Richard
- Publisher:
- Corporate Document Services; Great Britain. Department for Work and Pensions
- Publication year:
- 2006
- Pagination:
- 94p., bibliog.
- Place of publication:
- London
This report maintains that there is no clear dividing line between disabled people who can work and those who cannot. This highlights the difficulty of finding a fair and effective way of dividing disabled benefit claimants into two streams. The study also reveals that disabled people’s job prospects are strongly influenced by the detailed characteristics of their impairments. But they are much less disadvantaged by their impairments if they had a good education and live in a prosperous area. The research was motivated by a contrast: between the intensity of the policy interest in the economic position of disabled people and the lack of detailed understanding of the relationship between disability and employment. The study makes use of a unique survey, which describes the details of people’s medical conditions and the type and severity of their impairments. Three sets of disability characteristics are important: condition; type of impairment; and severity. These three packages of characteristics make a significant contribution to an explanation of the probability of being employed across the working-age population as a whole, and especially to an explanation of variations within the disabled group. What the research does not show is whether impairments reduce people’s capacity to work, or whether they increase employers’ (potentially discriminatory) reluctance to hire them.