Debating the Disability‒Employment Relationship in the Labour Market

This chapter offers a comprehensive review of the scholarly literature on the relationship between disability and employment. It focuses on the debate over whether labour market interventions have a positive impact on the employment of people with disabilities. A thorough review was conducted of the major studies on the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on the employment situation of people with disabilities. As this chapter notes, there is an increasing number of published studies on the relationship between disability and employment, however, the most productive institutions in this research are located in Western countries. Furthermore, there is still a scarcity of systematic studies on the phenomenon of persistently high unemployment rates among people with disabilities. As this chapter observes, no definitive conclusions have been reached in the research literature concerning the labour market outcomes of the ADA enactment. However, the opinions on the presence of the negative effects of the ADA are dominant, rather than the views on the absence of such effects. This chapter also traces the on-going debate on the effectiveness of labour market interventions beyond the context of the United States and reviews empirical studies done in other countries.