全球智库信息集成服务系统

Inspectorate Practices Vary Widely

• Some countries require new inspectors to have a specified minimum level of education; education in specific content areas, such as law or engineering; or threshold physical or personal characteristics.
• Some countries do or should require inspectors to be generalists, while others need more-specialized personnel.
• Initial training for new inspectors must cover a huge range of content. Amounts of ongoing training vary.
• Inadequate staffing and poor work conditions contribute to high turnover among inspectors.
• Measuring inspectors' performance can be difficult because the most easily measured metric is number of inspections performed, which might not be the most important metric.
• Corruption, often because of bribery, is difficult to track and even harder to combat.

This report examines the literature on labor inspection in developing countries in order to learn how human-resource practices in labor-enforcement agencies influence the performance of labor inspectorates in developing countries. As a supplement to a substantial literature about the advantages and disadvantages of alternative labor-law regimes and the effectiveness of alternative inspection strategies, this review highlights the state of knowledge about the conditions, competencies, and incentives needed for labor inspectors in developing countries to successfully carry out their work. This report focuses on two relatively narrow questions: What qualifications and personal characteristics are necessary for individual labor inspectors in developing countries to perform their jobs well, and what human-resource policies are important for creating an inspectorate with the necessary skills and enabling the inspectorate to function effectively?

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Objective Analysis. Effective Solutions.