Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields Recent documents in Gary S Fields en-us Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:24:38 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/41 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/41 Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:16:33 PST [Excerpt] In the summer of 1999, I first visited South Africa at the request of the South African government. The government was concerned about the nation's drastic unemployment situation, which in recent years has been estimated at 12-20% using the standard ILO definition (not working but actively looking for work) and which reached as high as 34% when account is also taken of persons who did not work, did not look for work, but who reported themselves willing to take a job if one were offered. Government believed that unemployment was caused by excessively high wages--excessive, that is, relative to market-clearing levels--so they asked us to estimate, inter alia, the wage elasticity of demand for labor. Note the role of both types of research here: government's core hypothesis came both from talking to business-people, who claimed that high wages discouraged them from employing more workers, and from prior econometric estimates. Gary S. Fields http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/39 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/39 Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:16:31 PST Welcoming the shift to outcomes which he perceives in the ILO's focus on decent work, the author explores the major issues thus raised. He discusses how to make the notion of decent work more precise in operational terms, and how to develop an integrated approach to economic and social policy in the decent work context, before formulating an empirical approach to assessing the effects of economic growth on decent work. Finally, he outlines a structure for the ILO's planned country reviews of progress towards decent work. Gary S. Fields http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/40 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/40 Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:16:31 PST [Excerpt] This study uses data from Malaysia's Household Income and Expenditure Surveys to quantify the importance of different factors in accounting for the changes in Malaysia's income distribution between 1984 and 1989 ("Period 1") and between 1989 and 1997 ("Period 2"). These particular years were chosen, because 1997 is the most recent available survey, 1984 is the earliest survey comparable to 1997, and 1989 is important for three reasons: 1. Income inequality fell until 1989 and rose thereafter. 2. Economic growth was slow in 1984-89 and fast in 1989-97. and 3. 1989 is the closest year to the beginning of Malaysia's National Development Policy, which placed heightened emphasis on the eradication of hardcore poverty. Gary S. Fields http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/38 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/38 Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:16:29 PST [Excerpt] The labour market is central in determining individual and household well-being in South Africa. Therefore, an understanding of earnings and employment dynamics is a key policy issue. However, the absence of panel data has constrained empirical work addressing these issues. This paper makes use of a regional panel data set for KwaZulu-Natal to begin the study of earnings and employment dynamics. The authors find that, on average, working-aged Africans in KwaZulu-Natal experienced large gains in earnings during the period 1993-8. These gains were progressive in nature, with the highest quintile of 1993 earners and those originally employed in the formal sector actually experiencing zero or negative growth in their average earnings. The average gain in earnings varied substantially depending on the employment transitions experienced by labour force participants. Obtaining formal sector employment is found to be an important pathway to growth in earnings, yet not exclusively so. The majority of those who get ahead do so by retaining employment in a given sector or moving into the informal sector. The dynamism of the informal sector over this period is shown to be an important contributor to the progressive growth in earnings. Government policies that seek to increase employment and earnings in the informal as well as formal sectors are recommended. Understanding the constraints preventing the vast number of unemployed from engaging in informal employment is shown to be a key issue for future work. Paul L. Cichello http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/36 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/36 Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:45:15 PST [Excerpt] According to the latest figures, today an estimated 3.1 billion people still live in absolute poverty, essentially all of them in the low- and middle-income countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa and none of them in what are traditionally called the "developed economies" of North America (excluding Mexico), Western Europe, and selected parts of Asia and Oceania. This book is about how the poor live and work and what actions the world community could take to improve poor people's earning opportunities as a central component of a multifaceted program aimed at ending the scourge of absolute economic misery. Gary S. Fields http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/37 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/37 Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:45:15 PST [Excerpt] Economic mobility has not been widely studied in developing countries until very recently owing to the lack of suitable data. Studying mobility requires longitudinal data tracking economic units (that is, individuals, households, or firms) over time. Collecting this type of data is expensive, and historically few Latin American countries carried it out. Now, however, such data sets are available for a number of Latin American and Caribbean countries; table A-1 in the appendix provides a list of available panel data sets that can be used for income mobility studies for these countries. In this paper, we discuss how the knowledge gleaned from mobility studies differs from comparable cross-sectional analysis. The structure of the paper is as follows. The next section discusses what mobility is, how it can be measured, and how it differs from inequality. The subsequent section reviews previous mobility studies in Latin American countries. The paper then summarizes the contributions of our own recent work, and the final section discusses what lies ahead in mobility research for Latin American economies. Gary S. Fields http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/35 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/35 Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:45:14 PST [Excerpt] The literature on income and earnings mobility falls into three categories: 1. Macro mobility studies address the entire economy. They ask the question, how much income mobility and/or earnings mobility is there in the economy? 2. A second group of studies, micro mobility studies, examines patterns of income and earnings change over time for different individuals or groups. They ask the questions, which individuals or households experience movements of what magnitudes, and what are the correlates and determinants of these movements? 3. Within the micro mobility studies are a number of studies that look specifically at poverty dynamics. These studies ask the question, how many households move into and out of poverty within a certain time frame and what are the correlates and determinants of these movements? -- The current project asks the following questions about earnings mobility: -- Who benefits the most from the growth process, and how much do they benefit? -- Who is left behind or made more vulnerable? -- Who is hurt when economic decline takes place and by how much (and who can withstand or even see income gains in such environments)? -- What are the forces behind these changes and behind the experiences of different groups of individuals? Given these questions, this literature review focuses on studies of micro earnings mobility. This review excludes a number other literatures: studies that present transition matrices across income classes; studies of macro mobility; studies of poverty dynamics, which necessarily are based on data on household incomes from all sources and/or household consumption; studies that use pseudo-panels rather than true panels or retrospective data; and studies using data from one or a very small number of villages, cities, or occupational groups. Gary S. Fields http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/34 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/34 Thu, 14 May 2009 12:52:52 PDT [Excerpt] 'Income-mobility' analysis involves following the same people for two or more points in time and studying the changes in their economic well-being. It is something of a cliché, but nonetheless true, that income mobility is multifaceted. Gary S. Fields http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/33 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/33 Thu, 14 May 2009 12:52:51 PDT [Excerpt] The main point of this chapter is to show that the different indices used in the mobility literature are not measures of the same underlying conceptual entity. In elementary statistics, students are taught that the mean and median are both measures of central tendency but they are different measures of central tendency; the variance and Gini coefficient are measures of dispersion but they are different measures of dispersion; and central tendency and dispersion are fundamentally different concepts from one another. In much the same way, this chapter maintains that the different mobility indices in common use are measuring fundamentally different mobility concepts from one another. It is in this sense that mobility really is multifaceted. Gary S. Fields http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/32 http://works.bepress.com/gary_fields/32 Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:48:26 PDT [Excerpt] This is a paper on labor markets. Why are labor markets important to economic development? Many individuals and institutions, including the World Bank and the regional development banks, seek "a world free of poverty." Broadly speaking, those who are poor are poor because 1) they earn little from the work they do, 2) the societies in which they live are too poor to provide them with substantial goods and services by virtue of their citizenship or residency, and 3) the poor are not permitted to move to richer countries. Thus, anti-poverty efforts can be focused on 1) helping people as workers (defined broadly to include wage employees, informal employees, and the self-employed in all ranges of the skill distribution), 2) helping people as citizens/residents through publicly-provided goods and services, and 3) striving for freer movement of labor from poor to rich countries. This paper is concerned with the first channel: helping improve labor market opportunities for workers. Gary S. Fields