Off-farm income constitutes a significant share of the household livelihood portfolios across Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the determinants and dynamics of individuals' participation in off-farm employment activities have not received adequate attention due to the weaknesses in individual-level data collection and the lack of longitudinal studies.
... See More + This paper uses national panel household survey data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda; provides empirical evidence on individual-level off-farm (wage and self) employment participation rates; analyzes the extent and drivers of entry into off-farm employment and continued employment; and conducts the analysis by gender and rural/urban location. A significant share of the rural and urban working-age individual population is found to participate in off-farm employment, ranging at the national level from 34 percent in Ethiopia to 58 percent in Malawi. Men participate in wage and self-employment to a significantly greater extent compared with women across time as well as within and across countries, apart from women's participation in non-farm enterprises being more common in Nigeria and Tanzania. The population weighted cross-country gender difference in off-farm employment stands at 9 percentage points, but this has declined over time in most countries. A substantial share of the population, amounting to about 39 million individuals across the five countries, is estimated to have entered and exited employment between 2010 and 2016, pointing to the dynamic nature of off-farm employment. Drivers of entry into off-farm employment and continued employment are country- and gender-specific, with demographic factors, occurrence of shocks, and job characteristics emerging as the most important determinants.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8540 AUG 06, 2018
The Gender Theme of the ABP II carries out comprehensive data - and evidence-based analyses on emerging challenges to gender equality and provides support to policy makers and innovative activities to address these challenges and increase women`s economic empowerment.
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Differences in earnings between male and female workers persist in developed and developing countries despite a narrowing of gender gaps in educational attainment over the past half-century.
... See More + This paper examines the gender wage gap in Vietnam and shows that a nontrivial part of the gap is associated with occupational sorting. The paper considers three explanations for why occupational sorting emerges. First, it explores whether women sort into occupations with better nonmonetary characteristics, such as paid leave and shorter hours. The data from Labor Force Surveys support this hypothesis. Second, it checks if occupational sorting among the adult labor force is driven by social norms about gender roles learned and internalized at an early age. To do so, the paper checks for evidence of sorting in the aspirations of 12-year-old children. Specifically, the analysis simulates what the gender wage gap would be if boys and girls pursued the occupations they aspired to at age 12, and the distribution of salaries remained unchanged. The paper does not find support for the hypothesis that gender norms drive occupational sorting by inducing aspirational sorting at an early age. Finally, for individuals with higher education, the paper checks if occupational sorting occurs during the school-to-work transition, when women face higher barriers in finding a job in their field of study. The analysis does not find evidence to support this last hypothesis. Overall, the findings suggest that in Vietnam gender-specific preferences for nonmonetary job characteristics play a key role in the emergence of occupational sorting.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8433 MAY 09, 2018
In Armenia, the proportion of women among employed workers increased from 45 to 48 percent between 2008 and 2015. This evolution was accompanied by a fall in the gender earnings gap; however, the difference in average wages of men and women is still among the largest in comparison with countries in the Europe and Central Asia region.
... See More + This study documents the gender wage gap in Armenia through stylized facts and further investigates its sources. The paper finds that the gender wage gap in hourly pay is 20 percent on average. Looking at the different percentiles, the disparity in wages in Armenia in 2015 shows an inverted U-shaped form with a larger differential in wages between men and women in the middle of the distribution. Using a reweighted, re-centered influence function decomposition, the analysis estimates the contribution of each covariate on the wage structure and composition effects along the wage distribution. The decomposition shows that the wage gap in Armenia is mostly driven by the wage structure effect (unexplained component), which accounts for almost all the wage gap in the middle part of the distribution (30th to 55th percentiles) and is even greater at the top, but better endowments of women offset it to some extent. In the bottom part of the distribution however, the composition effect is larger, consistent with lower endowments among women, for example, of skills and human capital.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8409 APR 17, 2018
This paper finds that capital and labor incomes in the United States have become more closely associated since the 1980s. This contributed to the well-known increase in the top 1 percent's share of total income, exacerbating rising inequality in capital incomes and earnings.
... See More + The paper shows that the trend in the association is U-shaped, as the recent increase contrasts with a tendency toward a weakening association until the 1980s. The paper uses data derived from tax records, studies the asymmetries in the association, tests for robustness to alternative income definitions, and discusses the potential role of declining top marginal tax rates.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8268 DEC 11, 2017
The fraction of workers currently covered by minimum wages in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is small, but as formality and urbanization increase, wage regulation will become increasingly relevant.
... See More + In this analysis, we find that higher minimum wage values are associated with higher levels of GDP per capita, in both SSA and non-SSA countries. Using two measures to assess the level at which minimum wages are set, we find that minimum wages in SSA countries are on average lower—relative to average wages—than most other comparable regions of the world. Thus, SSA as a whole reflects no particular bias toward a comparatively more pro–minimum wage policy. Within SSA, however, we observe that low-income countries set relatively higher minimum wages than middle- or upper-income countries. We find significant variation in the detail of minimum wage regimes and schedules in the region, as well as large variations in compliance. Notably, several countries in SSA have relatively complex minimum wage schedules, and on average. we find high levels of noncompliance among covered workers. We also summarize thelimited research on the employment effects of minimum wages in SSA, which are consistent with global results. By and large, introducing and raising the minimum wage appears to have small negative employment impacts or no statistically significant negative impacts. There are country studies, however, where substantial negative effects on employment are reported—often for specific cohorts. The release of country-level earnings and employment data at regular intervals lies at the heart of a more substantive,country-focused minimum wage research agenda for Africa.
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Which region will become the next global factory? As the work force ages and labor costs rise in China and other East Asian countries, many eyes turn to South Asia.
... See More + It is a region that is still largely rural, where agriculture accounts for a large share of employment and a substantial fraction of GDP, and it has not been particularly successful in integrating within itself and with the rest of the world. Yet, education levels are on the rise, and more than one million young workers enter the labor market each year, by 2030, 26 percent of the world’s working adults will live in South Asia. This is the region’s greatest opportunity and greatest challenge. What will determine South Asia’s ability to take advantage of the demographic transition to unlock its potential and accelerate growth, create jobs, reduce poverty, and boost shared prosperity? One of the answers lies in improving the region’s competitiveness. While different authors have proposed different definitions for the concept, this report chooses a simple approach by defining competitiveness as productivity (a la Porter, 1990). Despite relatively rapid economic growth, the contribution of total factor productivity (TFP) to the region’s growth has been low and factors subject to diminishing returns, quantity rather than quality of labor and non-ICT capital, have been the main drivers of growth. This calls for greater focus on improving productivity.
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Working Paper ACS8954 JUN 29, 2016
Lopez-Acevedo,Gladys C.; Medvedev,Denis; Palmade,Vincent; Varela,Gonzalo J.; Martuscelli,Antonio; Lage De Sousa,Filipe; Kokas,Deeksha; Ferrantino,Michael Joseph; Nayyar,Gaurav; Cirera,Xavier; Cusolito,Ana Paula; Van Der Mensbrugghe,Dominique; Shaw, Bill; Saraf,PriyamDisclosed
