Measuring and Harmonising Coverage, Generosity and History of Work‐Injury Policies Globally

ABSTRACT I present new measures of generosity, coverage and institutional characteristics of work‐injury policy across 189 countries in the Global Work‐Injury Policy Dataset (GWIP) version 2.0. To date, major research efforts produced detailed social policy data for the rich Western countries, and more recently countries of Eastern, Central and Central‐Eastern Europe. One of the products of this work, the Social Insurance Entitlements Dataset (SIED) has become a benchmark for social policy research. Using hand‐coded data, indicators from the International Labor Organisation, the U.S. Social Security Administration's ‘Social Security Programs Throughout the World’, and computational social science, I demonstrate a process to successfully extend and harmonise the SIED work‐injury coverage and generosity variables to cover the Global South; in total 167 countries. I also extrapolate to 189 countries in total using imputation for the year 2020 or latest. These data will further various welfare state and social policy research agendas, in particular in the area of work‐injury policy which is often understudied in comparison to other social security policies. As a demonstration I use the GWIP data to analyse classic hypotheses in welfare state research regarding the logic of industrialization and cultural values.