The 2004 Global Labor Survey: Workplace Institutions and Practices Around the World

This paper reports on an Internet-based survey designed to collect information on the state of workplace practices from labor experts and practitioners around the world -- the 2004 Global Labor Survey (GLS). This effort comes at a time of intense debate over the impact of labor market institutions on economic outcomes, in which analysts use diverse indices of practices and/or measures of de jure labor regulations to examine the link between the labor market and general economic success. On one side of the debate are economists and policymakers who attribute some of the economic problems in advanced countries and failures of developing countries to labor market rigidities that result from government regulations or union activities. On the other side are economists and policy-makers who argue that the redistributive and other benefits from regulations and unionism exceed whatever costs they create in the form of less flexible markets, and that absent institutions, labor markets do not function as perfect invisible hand mechanisms