placestats

Aid given vs. Vulnerable employment

Holds up after adjusting for income

Across 47 countries, Aid given and Vulnerable employment rise and fall together at r = -0.35 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). Comparing only countries with similar income (GDP per person) flips the link to +0.14 (q = 0.030, allowing for the many pairs tested). The first figure pointed the other way only as richer and poorer countries differ. Caution: leave-one-out range spans 0.15 in r.

Comparing countries across the middle half of aid given, 0.134% to 0.432% of GNI, vulnerable employment is better by 4.22% of employment at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap reverses, to 1.81% of employment the other way.

Link before adjusting (r)-0.345p = 0.018 · 47 countries
After adjusting for national income+0.142p = 0.347 · likely range [-0.15, +0.42]
p, allowing for regions0.002standard error 0.014 · 4 regions
Check for luck (q)0.030across 12,497 pairs

How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.

Aid given · % of GNIlink with income +0.68 · high
Vulnerable employment · % of employmentlink with income -0.87 · proxy

Both of these rise and fall closely with national income, so a strong link between them before adjusting was close to certain. Read the adjusted figure, not the first one.

“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.

Every country as a dot

Aid given · % of GNI →Vulnerable employment · % of employment →0.0118%1.03%0.456%53.8%United Arab Emirates: 0.613% of GNI, 1.5% of employmentAustralia: 0.184% of GNI, 9.12% of employmentAustria: 0.329% of GNI, 7.85% of employmentAzerbaijan: 0.0633% of GNI, 53.8% of employmentBelgium: 0.37% of GNI, 11% of employmentBulgaria: 0.117% of GNI, 6.92% of employmentCanada: 0.316% of GNI, 9.56% of employmentSwitzerland: 0.46% of GNI, 9.6% of employmentCyprus: 0.0384% of GNI, 8.38% of employmentCzechia: 0.116% of GNI, 13.5% of employmentGermany: 0.558% of GNI, 4.34% of employmentDenmark: 0.723% of GNI, 5.4% of employmentSpain: 0.271% of GNI, 10.1% of employmentEstonia: 0.193% of GNI, 7.09% of employmentFinland: 0.443% of GNI, 9.46% of employmentFrance: 0.423% of GNI, 8.5% of employmentUnited Kingdom: 0.432% of GNI, 11.5% of employmentGreece: 0.13% of GNI, 23.1% of employmentCroatia: 0.236% of GNI, 6.35% of employmentHungary: 0.139% of GNI, 7.83% of employmentIreland: 0.425% of GNI, 9.64% of employmentIceland: 0.337% of GNI, 8.4% of employmentIsrael: 0.0512% of GNI, 7.7% of employmentItaly: 0.296% of GNI, 14.3% of employmentJapan: 0.345% of GNI, 7.49% of employmentKazakhstan: 0.0188% of GNI, 24.8% of employmentKorea, Rep.: 0.203% of GNI, 17.7% of employmentKuwait: 0.113% of GNI, 2.4% of employmentLithuania: 0.212% of GNI, 10.4% of employmentLuxembourg: 0.993% of GNI, 6.95% of employmentLatvia: 0.18% of GNI, 8.62% of employmentMalta: 0.205% of GNI, 10.1% of employmentNetherlands: 0.58% of GNI, 13.4% of employmentNorway: 1.03% of GNI, 4.17% of employmentNew Zealand: 0.273% of GNI, 12.6% of employmentPoland: 0.162% of GNI, 15% of employmentPortugal: 0.178% of GNI, 9.66% of employmentQatar: 0.432% of GNI, 0.456% of employmentRomania: 0.135% of GNI, 13% of employmentRussian Federation: 0.0667% of GNI, 4.93% of employmentSaudi Arabia: 0.447% of GNI, 1.66% of employmentSlovak Republic: 0.133% of GNI, 11.8% of employmentSlovenia: 0.216% of GNI, 10.6% of employmentSweden: 0.849% of GNI, 6.87% of employmentThailand: 0.0118% of GNI, 48% of employmentTurkiye: 0.501% of GNI, 23.9% of employmentUnited States: 0.094% of GNI, 3.81% of employmentAZEKAZKWTLUXNORRUSSWETHAUSA

best-fit line line after adjusting

Four ways to measure the link

MethodrpCountries
Standard (Pearson), not adjusted-0.3450.01847
By rank (Spearman), not adjusted-0.3120.03347
Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income+0.1420.34747
By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income-0.0100.94747

The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 47 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: +0.203 (a minus sign means it grew).

How solid is it?

Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from +0.082 (without AZE) to +0.236 (without IRL). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: IRL (+0.094).

Fragile: this link may not hold up.
  • leave-one-out range spans 0.15 in r
  • correlation moves sharply once outliers are trimmed
  • sign flips once outliers are trimmed

Within each region

Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.

nr
Europe & Central Asia34+0.12

By income third

If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.

nr
Poorest third16+0.06
Middle third15+0.04
Richest third16-0.12

By largest religious group

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

nr
Christians33-0.16

Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = -0.104 after dropping 7 countries.

Two series, one country

Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.

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Over time, within countries

Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 35years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.

Within countries over time, there is no link that is clearly more than chance (r = -0.245, comparing each country only with itself over the years, and each year only with the same year elsewhere). Whatever the cross-country picture shows, countries whose aid given moved did not tend to see their vulnerable employment move with it.

Across countries (adjusted)+0.142for comparison
Within countries-0.356each country vs itself
…and vs the same year elsewhere-0.245q = 0.374 · 47 countries
Year-on-year changes-0.046q = 0.098
Read with care.
  • Almost all of the second indicator's variation is between countries, so the within-country estimate rests on a small part of the data.

1,263 country-years (one country in one year), 47 countries, 1991–2025, about 27 years each on average. Share of the variation that happens within countries over time: 20% for Aid given, 7% for Vulnerable employment. The margins of error allow for each country appearing many times, and for each year’s value being close to the year before.

Year-to-year changes are a cautious test, not a final answer. Looking only at changes from one year to the next removes each country’s own trends. But it also makes measurement mistakes louder, which pulls the results toward zero. A near-zero result here is weak evidence of no link, not proof.

With one measure years behind the other

0.30−0.3-100+10years Vulnerable employment trails Aid given →lag -10: r = -0.242 (n = 1,012)lag -9: r = -0.246 (n = 1,040)lag -8: r = -0.245 (n = 1,068)lag -7: r = -0.249 (n = 1,095)lag -6: r = -0.255 (n = 1,120)lag -5: r = -0.259 (n = 1,144)lag -4: r = -0.259 (n = 1,167)lag -3: r = -0.254 (n = 1,191)lag -2: r = -0.248 (n = 1,215)lag -1: r = -0.247 (n = 1,239)lag +0: r = -0.245 (n = 1,263)lag +1: r = -0.236 (n = 1,245)lag +2: r = -0.221 (n = 1,199)lag +3: r = -0.207 (n = 1,149)lag +4: r = -0.184 (n = 1,100)lag +5: r = -0.153 (n = 1,057)lag +6: r = -0.126 (n = 1,008)lag +7: r = -0.100 (n = 964)lag +8: r = -0.068 (n = 916)lag +9: r = -0.028 (n = 870)lag +10: r = 0.005 (n = 825)

Same year (lag 0): -0.245. A peak away from zero does not show which comes first. These series change slowly — this year’s value is close to last year’s. That makes the curve smooth and nearly symmetric, whatever produced the data. Even a sharp peak at one lag (a gap of some years) would not prove that one measure changes the other.

The data


% of GNI
% of employment		Years
Norway NOR1.03%4.17%2025
Luxembourg LUX0.993%6.95%2025
Sweden SWE0.849%6.87%2025
Denmark DNK0.723%5.4%2025
United Arab Emirates ARE0.613%1.5%2025
Netherlands NLD0.58%13.4%2025
Germany DEU0.558%4.34%2025
Turkiye TUR0.501%23.9%2025
Switzerland CHE0.46%9.6%2025
Saudi Arabia SAU0.447%1.66%2024, 2025
Finland FIN0.443%9.46%2025
Qatar QAT0.432%0.456%2025
United Kingdom GBR0.432%11.5%2025
Ireland IRL0.425%9.64%2025
France FRA0.423%8.5%2025

OECD databases as named on each indicator: PISA, Social Expenditure Database (SOCX), Income Distribution Database, Development Assistance Committee statistics, Family Database, Government at a Glance, Corporate Tax Statistics, employment and environment statistics
World Bank, World Development Indicators

Sources

Aid given

Official development assistance given

OECD · via Our World in Data · CC BY 4.0 (OECD terms and conditions) · updated annual, except the snapshots noted per indicator

Donor countries only, about fifty. Countries that receive aid do not appear, so any link with this is a link among rich countries. No "better" direction is set.

Vulnerable employment

Vulnerable employment, total (% of total employment)

International Labour Organization · CC BY 4.0 · updated quarterly

Self-employed workers and unpaid family workers, who have no employer and usually no protection. The ILO estimates it with a model for every country and year, which is why it is complete where surveys are not.

How this was computed

Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2020–2025. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 4 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 12,497 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated DYB 2024. How the country data works · explore Aid given and Vulnerable employment

This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that Aid given changes Vulnerable employment, or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.

More links with Aid given or Vulnerable employment