Discapacidad y mercado laboral en el Ecuador.

Abstract

Disability is a condition that almost everyone can suffer from at some point in life. Throughout the years, the concept of disability has changed, before it was considered a punishment and, in many cultures, people with disabilities were sacrificed. Today, disability is a public health problem. Several attempts have been made to achieve the inclusion of this group in all spheres of society. However, there are still barriers that condition and restrict social participation of people with disabilities, especially in the workplace, revealing discrimination against this group of people. Therefore, this research analyzes the factors that influence the probability that a person with a disability is active in the labor market. For this, two models were estimated, a logit model and a multinomial logit were estimated, using data from Encuesta Nacional de Salud y Nutrición (ENSANUT) (2018). The main findings of this research suggest that the probability that people with disabilities participate in the Ecuadorian labor market is lower for people with disabilities with respect to people who do not present this condition, with this becoming more visible in the case of women. However, the negative effect of disability on labor market participation is attenuated in the case of people with a high level of education and for those who live in rural areas and self-identify as indigenous.