Do laws designed to protect workers help or hurt them? A team based at the Cambridge Centre for Business Research (CBR) led by Simon Deakin has created the CBR Labour Regulation Index (CBR-LRI) to achieve a better understanding of how labour laws work in practice and, in particular, how they might be used to promote more egalitarian and inclusive forms of economic growth.
The CBR-LRI is an original and methodologically innovative dataset of labour laws from around the world which has been constructed at Cambridge over the past decade.
Use of the CBR-LRI by international agencies, including the International Labour Organization (ILO) and Asian Development Bank, is changing their understanding of the role of labour laws in promoting sustainable economic development and growth. The Cambridge team has used the dataset to give advice to policymakers in several countries across Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, and, through knowledge exchange, supported a major labour law reform initiative in Vietnam in 2019.
“…the CBR-LRI database is an indispensable resource.”
– Director, Economic Research and Regional Cooperation Department, Asian Development Bank
