Children’s Work in Nigeria: Exploring the Implications of Gender, Urban–Rural Residence, and Household Socioeconomic Status

Child labor in developing countries continues to be a topic of policy and academic concern, particularly in Africa where there are more working children than in any other region. Scholarly attention has been drawn in part to gender, place of residence, and socioeconomic status as factors that shape the type of work that children perform and whether it impacts educational attainment. I explore these issues in the context of Nigeria through analysis of data from the 2004 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey EdData Survey. A series of logistic regression models of child labor confirm the existence of gender and, especially, socioeconomic disparities in children??s work. The data also indicate that girls and rural children face a double risk of working if they belong to poor households. A policy implication is that poverty alleviation programs??such as Mexico??s Oportunidades program (the erstwhile PROGRESA)??may help to reduce those forms of child labor that interfere with schooling. That this program has been found to more beneficial for girls suggests it may be particularly appropriate for Nigeria where gender disparities persist.     

Comparative labor supply of black and white women

Conclusions The presence of young children decreases women’s labor supply as shown by the LFPRs for women with young children (which are always considerably lower than those for women without young children). Also, the number of young children is almost always negatively related to annual hours of labor supplied (significantly so in half the regressions). Black and white women are found to have an inelastic labor supply, but with increasing elasticity from 1969 to 1974. There is a statistically significant difference in the estimated regression coefficients of the labor supply model for black and white married women in 1969 and 1974 in both the arithmetic and logarithmic forms. The husband’s earnings are significantly negatively related to white married women’s annual hours of work in 1974, while the relationship is not significant for black married women. Crosselasticity terms show that white married women decrease their annual hours of work in response to an increase in husband’s earnings to a greater extent than black married women in 1971 and 1974. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that black women do not rely on their husband’s earnings to as great an extent as white women.     

中国尚未到达刘易斯转折点

本文提出中国进入刘易斯转折点的判断标准:农民工实际工资较快提升,农民工与农民纯收入之比快速增加,"民工荒"及农民工工资上涨原因是劳动力短缺;实证表明中国尚未进入刘易斯转折点。最后针对"民工荒"及农民工工资上涨提出政策建议:推进农民工有序市民化、加快土地流转进程、力促农村剩余劳动力条理转移和提高农民工劳动力市场质量。     

Long-term effects of labor market conditions on family formation for Japanese youth

This study aims to examine how each cohort’s family formation is affected by labor market conditions experienced in youth in Japan. Although the deterioration in youth employment opportunities has often been blamed for Japan’s declining fertility rate, the effect of slack labor market conditions on fertility is theoretically unclear. We estimate the effects of regional labor market conditions at entry to the labor market and contemporaneous conditions on fertility, controlling for nation-wide year effects and prefecture fixed effects, and find the following. First, high school-educated women who experienced a recession while entering the labor market are less likely to have children. In contrast, a recession rather increases fertility among college-educated women. When summed up, the aggregate impact of labor market conditions experienced in youth on fertility is weak. Second, the unemployment rate at entry to the labor market is positively correlated with the probability of having two or more children conditionally on having at least one child. Third, the contemporaneous unemployment rate is negatively correlated with marriage of women in the local labor market, although the correlation is weak and concentrated on the less educated group.     

Financial and economic characteristics and trends of interstate labor migration

International labor migration and its financial and economic consequences in the form of labor migrants?? international cash transfers are reviewed in the paper. The trends in labor migration from CIS countries to Russia are revealed.     

Marginalization Revisited: Women's Market Work and Pay,and Economic Development

A substantial literature argues that women have been left out of economic development, but evidence from labor force surveys in middle-income developing countries suggests otherwise. Women's participation rates in the market labor force have been increasing, women have shifted into white-collar occupations, and certain previously male-dominated occupations have become female-dominated (clerical work in Asia, for example). Women's relative pay has risen somewhat faster in Asia and Latin America than occurred during industrialization in the United States. Although inequalities remain, there is no evidence that women on average are being marginalized.     

Women's labor force participation and marriage: The case of Korea

In this paper, we examine the relationship between marital status and female labor force participation in Korea, and argue that marriage remains a major obstacle to young Korean women's employment. We find that an average married woman is much less likely (by 40–60%) to participate in the labor force than a single woman in urban Korea. Further investigation into the participation patterns among married women reveals that labor force participation rate (LFPR) varies with husband's occupation and her own age. Lower LFPR among the young married women is explained by demand-side factors, while relatively higher LFPR among the middle-aged married women is mostly explained by the supply-side factors.     

What accounts for the decline in labor force participation among married women in urban China, 1991–2011?

Since the advent of Communist movement in the 1940s, women in China have been portrayed as equal partners to men in their labor force participation, operating under slogans such as “Women hold up half the sky”. Political rhetoric in the Mao era suggested that gender parity could be attained through women's participation in paid employment and full time work outside the home became routine for most urban women. Subsequent to the reforms, however, China has experienced a sharp decline in urban women's labor force participation. Utilizing micro-level data spanning from 1991 to 2011, individual women's labor force decisions are analyzed in order to identify the reasons for the decline. Changes in covariates explain only a small portion of the observed decline. However, over the study interval the wage returns to education increased markedly, and the distribution of wages widened considerably. These factors, combined with a high wage elasticity of participation, are consistent with the pattern of declining labor force participation found in the data. As such, promotion of women's education, particularly at the upper secondary level and beyond, could be expected to offset the downward trend.     

论我国生育保险制度的完善

人口生育是一国劳动力生产的唯一途径,对一个国家的长远发展有深刻而重大的意义。在计划生育基本国策贯彻执行的基础上,我国的人口数量基本符合经济社会发展需要。然而,现阶段为了实现人口优生优育,我国需要完善现行生育保险制度,把游离在生育保险政策之外的育龄妇女纳入生育保险覆盖范围,使其孕育行为处于医疗“干预”下,在保障男女劳动力合理流动、妇女权益得到保障的基础上,实现我国人口优生优育,为培育高素质人才打下坚实基础。     

Remittance Income Volatility and Labor Supply in Mexico

Using the 2000 through 2008 waves of the Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH), Mexico's income and expenditure survey, we estimate the way in which volatility surrounding the inflows of international remittances impacts male and female labor supply. We find that male and female labor supply decreases with higher levels of remittance income. Additionally, increases in remittance income volatility raise the employment likelihood of men and women, as well as the hours worked by employed women. Since men are more likely than women to be employed full‐time, women may be better suited to respond to increased volatility in remittance income by raising the number of hours worked. Overall, the findings are suggestive of labor supply being used as a buffer against income shortfalls and increased volatility in remittance inflows.     

Why Governments Should Invest More to Educate Girls

Women and men often receive the same percentage increase in their wage rates with advances in schooling. Because these returns decline with more schooling, the marginal returns for women will tend to exceed those for men, especially in countries where women are much less educated. The health and schooling of children are more closely related to their mother's education than father's. More educated women work more hours in the market labor force, broadening the tax base and thereby potentially reducing tax distortions. These three conditions, it is argued, justify the disproportionate allocation of public expenditures toward women's education.     

The Great Depression and the rise of female employment: A new hypothesis

The life-cycle labor supply of women born at the turn of the 20th century diverged sharply from previous cohorts. Although they had similar participation rates in early adulthood, younger cohorts were significantly more likely to work at middle age. This paper documents a link between these changing patterns of female labor supply and the Great Depression. We find that the onset of the Great Depression led to an increase in young women's employment in 1930 via an added-worker effect. Cohorts induced into the workforce in the early 1930s had significantly higher employment rates through the 1940s and 1950s of up to 3 percentage points, suggesting a permanent impact of the Great Depression on women's lifecycle labor supply.     

Wages for Wives: Renegotiating Gender and Production Relations in Contract Farming in the Dominican Republic

This study analyzes the intersection of gender and production relations in small-scale contracting in nontraditional agriculture. The case of the processing tomato industry in the Dominican Republic exemplifies patterns found throughout the region. Building on a critique of unitary household models, I analyze the gendered relations mobilizing resources for contract farming. As appears common, contracting has heightened demand for women's farm labor. Contracting has simultaneously provided women with openings for contesting the appropriation of their unpaid labor and many women are claiming payment for work in contract farming. This case demonstrates the importance of gender issues in informing contract farming debates and policy interventions.     

When Will the Gender Gap in Retirement Income Narrow?

Among recent retirees, women receive substantially less retirement income from Social Security and private pensions than men. Increases in women's labor market attachment and earnings relative to men over the past 50 years provide some optimism for an improvement in female retirement income, particularly for married women. This study shows that women's income from Social Security and private pensions has improved only slightly relative to men over the past 25 years. Using data on people approaching retirement age over the next 20 years, prospects for future improvement are investigated. One of the main conclusions is that pension income among women (particularly married women) will rise sharply relative to men's over the next few decades, but a substantial gap could remain even if women close the gap in experience and salaries.     

Imperfect Intersectoral Labor Mobility and Monetary Shocks in a Small Open Economy

In this paper, we model the assumption of imperfect labor mobility across sectors in the New Open-Economy Macroeconomics framework to assess its impact on output, inflation, and welfare. Following a permanent home monetary expansion in a small open economy, we find that the above-mentioned assumption leads to: (i) less expansionary effects on (traded) output in the short term, although also less contractionary in the long term; (ii) lower short-term inflation but higher in the long term; and (iii) less intertemporal welfare, with even a ??beggar thyself?? problem being possible.     

Does the early bird catch the worm? Evidence and interpretation on the long-term impact of school entry age in China

The long-term impact of children's age at primary school entry on educational attainment and labor market outcomes is one of the primary concerns to families, educators, and policymakers. Using a nationally representative survey of families and individuals, this paper is among the first to explore these effects in a causal sense in the Chinese context and understand the underlying mechanisms. We use a regression discontinuity (RD) design that employs the threshold date for primary school entry set by the 1986 Compulsory Education Law of China as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of school entry. We first document a salient and robust compliance rate of school entry requirement. RD estimates indicate that being born right after the cutoff date significantly increases years of schooling and annual earnings for non-agricultural jobs for the full sample. We also observe remarkable heterogeneous effects on labor market performance by gender. Being born right after the cutoff increases the probability of being in the labor force for men, but decreases that for women. We find that the decline in female labor force participation is mainly driven by women who come from economically and socially disadvantaged families. Further evidence suggests that this decline can be explained by supply-side factors including fertility decision and childcare provisions.     

Working Women in an Urban Setting: Traders,Vendors and Food Security in Accra

Data collected from a 1997 household survey carried out in Accra, Ghana are used to look at the crucial role that women play as income earners and securing access to food in urban areas. One-third of the households surveyed are headed by women. For all households, women's labor force participation is high with 75% of all households having at least one working woman. The high number of female-headed households and the large percentage of working women in the sample provide a good backdrop for looking at how women earn and spend income differently than men in an urban area. Livelihood strategies for both men and women are predominantly labor based and dependent on social networks. For all households in the sample, food is still the single most important item in the total budget. Yet, important and striking differences between men's and women's livelihoods and expenditure patterns exist. Compared to men, women are less likely to be employed as wage earners, and more likely to work as street food vendors or petty traders. Women earn lower incomes, but tend to allocate more of their budget to basic goods for themselves and their children, while men spend more on entertainment for themselves only. Despite lower incomes and additional demands on their time as housewives and mothers, female-headed households, petty traders and street food vendors have the largest percentage of food-secure households. Women may be achieving household food security, but at what cost? This paper explores differences in income, expenditure and consumption patterns in an effort to answer this question, and suggests ways that urban planners and policy makers can address special concerns to working women in urban areas.     

The Implicit Costs of Motherhood over the Lifecycle: Cross-Cohort Evidence from Administrative Longitudinal Data

It is well known that the explicit costs of raising a child have grown over the past several decades. Less well understood are the implicit costs of having a child, and how they have changed over time. In this article, we are the first to examine the evolution of the implicit costs of motherhood over the lifecycle and across generations using high quality administrative data. We estimate that the lifetime labor market income gap between mothers and women who never have children (never-mothers) decreases from around $350,000 to $280,000 between women born in the late 1940s and late 1960s. Gaps tend to increase monotonically over the lifecycle, and decrease monotonically between cohorts. Our evidence suggests that changes in the gaps are caused by changing labor force participation rates.     

Socioeconomic Context,Family Regimes,and Women's Early Labor Market Experience: The Case of Colombia and Venezuela

This paper compares the early labor market experience of mature and young cohorts of women in Bogotá and Caracas. The cross-country, cross-cohort comparisons demonstrate the importance of both rising women's human capital and family regimes to women's labor market behavior. While divorce was a central stimulus of women's work in both contexts, the more stable, patriarchal family regime in Bogotá more strongly conflicted with employment than the matrifocal and flexible pattern in Caracas. Results also show important changes in the dynamics of female employment, as younger cohorts exhibit more intermittent and unstable employment patterns.