Poverty Reduction from Full Employment: A Time Use Approach

Despite long working hours, for many household members, and especially women, underemployment is nevertheless affecting a large share of the population in many developing countries. Using data on time use, wages, and consumption levels from a recent household survey for Guinea, this paper provides a simple framework for assessing the potential impact on poverty and inequality of an increase in the working hours of the population up to what is referred to as a full employment workload. The framework provides for a decomposition of the contribution to higher household consumption of an increase in working hours for both men and women. The key message is that job creation and full employment would lead to a significant reduction in poverty, even at the relatively low current levels of wages and earnings enjoyed by the population. However, even at full employment levels, poverty would remain massive, and the higher workload that the full employment scenario would entail would be significant.Time use; labor supply; poverty; intrahousehold allocation

Working long hours and having no choice : time poverty in Guinea

This paper provides a new definition of'time poverty'as working long hours and having no choice to do otherwise. An individual is time poor if he/she is working long hours and is also monetary poor, or would fall into monetary poverty if he/she were to reduce his/her working hours below a given time poverty line. Thus being time poor results from the combination of two conditions. First, the individual does not have enough time for rest and leisure once all working hours (whether spent in the labor market or doing household chores such as cooking, and fetching water and wood) are accounted for. Second, the individual cannot reduce his/her working time without either increasing the level of poverty of his/her household (if the household is already poor) or leading his/her household to fall into monetary poverty due to the loss in income or consumption associated with the reduction in working time (if the household is not originally poor). The paper applies the concepts of the traditional poverty literature to the analysis of time poverty and presents a case study using data for Guinea in 2002-03. Both univariate and multivariate results suggest that women are significantly more likely to be time poor than men.Rural Poverty Reduction,Population Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Scientific Research&Science Parks

Measuring Time Poverty and Analyzing its Determinants: Concepts and Application to Guinea

The availability of better data on time use in developing countries makes it important to provide tools for analyzing such data. Conceptually, time poverty can be understood as the fact that some individuals do not have enough time for rest and leisure after taking into account the time spent working, whether in the labor market, for domestic work, or for other activities such as fetching water and wood. Unlike consumption or income, where economists assume that ‘more is better', time is a limited resource – more time spent working in paid or unpaid work-related activities means less leisure, and therefore higher ‘time poverty''. This paper provides a simple application of the concepts used in the consumption poverty literature to time use, in order to obtain measures of time poverty for the population as a whole and for various groups of individuals.

Women's employment, children and transition: an empirical analysis on Poland

The effect of transition from centrally planned to market economies on female employment is unclear a-priori. Many studies have pointed out that the emergence of labour markets created obstacles to but also new opportunities for women’s employment. A frequently mentioned potential explanation of the lower female participation during the transition period is represented by the reduction of childcare facilities, which created a major constraint on the participation of women with dependent children. However, we must not forget the effect of forces of opposite sign, first of all the household necessity of having two earners during the turbulent transition period. The aim of this paper is to give an empirical assessment on how the transition to a market economy affected the relationship between motherhood and labour force outcomes in Poland. We estimate random effects probit models on two PACO panel datasets covering a four year period before the reform (1987-1990) and a three year period afterwards (1994-1996). Our findings indicate that during transition small children were much less of a deterrent to the employment probability of their mother than it was before transition

Do Labor Statistics Depend on How and to Whom the Questions Are Asked? Results from a Survey Experiment in Tanzania

Labor market statistics are critical for assessing and understanding economic development. In practice, widespread variation exists in how labor statistics are measured in household surveys in low-income countries. Little is known whether these differences have an effect on the labor statistics they produce. This paper analyzes these effects by implementing a survey experiment in Tanzania that varied two key dimensions: the level of detail of the questions and the type of respondent. Significant differences are observed across survey designs with respect to different labor statistics. Labor force participation rates, for example, vary by as much as 10 percentage points across the four survey assignments. Using a short labor module without screening questions on employment generates lower female labor force participation and lower rates of wage employment for both men and women. Response by proxy rather than self-report yields lower male labor force participation, lower female working hours, and lower employment in agriculture for men. The differences between proxy and self reporting seem to come from information imperfections within the household, especially with the distance in age between respondent and subject playing an important role, while gender and educational differences seem less important.Tanzania, survey design, labor statistics, field experiment

Do labor statistics depend on how and to whom the questions are asked ? results from a survey experiment in Tanzania

Labor market statistics are critical for assessing and understanding economic development. In practice, widespread variation exists in how labor statistics are measured in household surveys in low-income countries. Little is known whether these differences have an effect on the labor statistics they produce. This paper analyzes these effects by implementing a survey experiment in Tanzania that varied two key dimensions: the level of detail of the questions and the type of respondent. Significant differences are observed across survey designs with respect to different labor statistics. Labor force participation rates, for example, vary by as much as 10 percentage points across the four survey assignments. Using a short labor module without screening questions on employment generates lower female labor force participation and lower rates of wage employment for both men and women. Response by proxy rather than self-report yields lower male labor force participation, lower female working hours, and lower employment in agriculture for men. The differences between proxy and self reporting seem to come from information imperfections within the household, especially with the distance in age between respondent and subject playing an important role, while gender and educational differences seem less important.Labor Markets,Labor Policies,Work&Working Conditions,Social Analysis,Housing&Human Habitats

Measuring the Generosity of Unemployment Benefit Systems: Evidence from Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe

The paper considers two aspects of the targeting of unemployment benefit systems (a) the probability that benefit is received in the population of those unemployed on standard international criteria of search and availability, and (b) the probability in the population of benefit recipients that search is conducted. The focus is on Hungary but stylised facts for a range of Central European countries and two EU comparators are derived in the first part of the paper. The second part of the paper finds that most of the large decline in coverage of the Hungarian unemployed by insurance benefit (received by only a quarter of the searching stock in 1997) cannot be explained by changes in the composition of unemployment observable in labour force survey data (including unemployment duration). The probability of active search (search other than through a state employment office) is found to be very similar for those receiving insurance and assistance benefit.

Explaining Variation in Child Labor Statistics

Child labor statistics are critical for assessing the extent and nature of child labor activities in developing countries. In practice, widespread variation exists in how child labor is measured. Questionnaire modules vary across countries and within countries over time along several dimensions, including respondent type and the structure of the questionnaire. Little is known about the effect of these differences on child labor statistics. This paper presents the results from a randomized survey experiment in Tanzania focusing on two survey aspects: different questionnaire design to classify children work and proxy response versus self-reporting. Use of a short module compared with a more detailed questionnaire has a statistically significant effect, especially on child labor force participation rates, and, to a lesser extent, on working hours. Proxy reports do not differ significantly from a child’s self-report. Further analysis demonstrates that survey design choices affect the coefficient estimates of some determinants of child labor in a child labor supply equation. The results suggest that low-cost changes to questionnaire design to clarify the concept of work for respondents can improve the data collected.child labor, survey design, Tanzania

Poverty Reduction from Full Employment: A Time Use Approach

Despite long working hours, for many household members, and especially women, underemployment is nevertheless affecting a large share of the population in many developing countries. Using data on time use, wages, and consumption levels from a recent household survey for Guinea, this paper provides a simple framework for assessing the potential impact on poverty and inequality of an increase in the working hours of the population up to what is referred to as a full employment workload. The framework provides for a decomposition of the contribution to higher household consumption of an increase in working hours for both men and women. The key message is that job creation and full employment would lead to a significant reduction in poverty, even at the relatively low current levels of wages and earnings enjoyed by the population. However, even at full employment levels, poverty would remain massive, and the higher workload that the full employment scenario would entail would be significant

Measuring Time Poverty and Analyzing Its Determinants: Concepts and Application to Guinea

The availability of better data on time use in developing countries makes it important to provide tools for analyzing such data. While the idea of “time poverty” is not new, and while many papers have provided measures of time use and hinted at the concept of time poverty, we have not seen in the literature formal discussions and measurement of the concept of time poverty alongside the techniques used for measuring consumption poverty. Conceptually, time poverty can be understood as the fact that some individuals do not have enough time for rest and leisure after taking into account the time spent working, whether in the labor market, for domestic work, or for other activities such as fetching water and wood. Unlike consumption or income, where economists assume that “more is better,” time is a limited resource—more time spent working in paid or unpaid work-related activities means less leisure, and therefore higher “time poverty.” Our aim in this paper is to provide a simple application of the concepts used in the consumption poverty literature to time use, in order to obtain measures of time poverty for a population as a whole and for various groups of individuals