Disability and health problems as barriers to employment in Spain

Abstract

The labour inclusion of people with disabilities is one of the objectives of labour and social policies. Indeed, this group is perceived increasingly less as a group of people with physical and social limitations and more as people with goals and challenges that can be overcome with appropriate social and institutional support (Livermore et al., 2000). However, advances in this field are insufficient, according to data available from the Spanish Statistical Office. As an example, the employment rate of people with disabilities in 2016 was 25.1%, which is a 2.5-point increase since 2014; this rate is still 40 points below the employment rate of people without disabilities. Despite such limited progress, the number of studies on the relationship between disability and economic activity in Spain is scarce, and these studies have some limitations. Many are simply descriptive analyses. Other conditional analyses mainly examine labour participation, without distinguishing between the heterogeneous groups that coexist within each of these two situations: participation (e.g., self-employed, paid employees, unemployed) and nonparticipation (e.g., student, home workers, early retired individuals). Finally, most of them are based on relatively obsolete data.