The Impact of Household Labor Supply Structure on Poverty

Research mostly in the context of developed economies shows that the transformation of household structure from single male breadwinner families to dual earner families is associated with decreasing rates of poverty as well as lower levels of income inequality. This paper uses micro data from Turkish household income and budget surveys for 2003 and 2010 to examine to what extent household labor supply structure has an impact on family income, poverty and income inequality. We classify married couple households by labor supply of husbands and wives and explore any differentials in household income levels, poverty rates as well as income inequality measures amongst dual earner versus male breadwinner households. We also use counterfactual household labor supply structures to explore the potential changes in poverty risk as families transform from single male breadwinner to dual earner families. Given the phenomenally low female labor force participation rate in Turkey, one of the lowest in the world, a structural characteristic of most countries in the Middle East, we show that increasing female employment has strong potential not only in terms of gender equality but also as a sustainable strategy against poverty

COVID-19, Gender, and Labor

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered simultaneously a global health crisis and a global economic crisis, which have further deepened existing inequalities along several dimensions, including gender. Increasing gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work has been a primary outcome of the pandemic and the associated economic crisis. Given the disproportionate gender division of labor, women were foremost in bearing the brunt of the increased demands on unpaid care work under the lockdown conditions. At the same time, women were also overrepresented in informal employment and service sectors hard-hit by the pandemic, resulting in more severe job loss for female workers overall. In many labor markets, women constituted the majority of so-called essential workers, who were protected from job loss yet exposed to increased health risks and prolonged work hours under distressed work conditions. The increasing demand for household production and the unpaid work burden contributed to weakening women’s labor market attachment, resulting in higher declines in female labor force participation than male. The increased prevalence of teleworking under the pandemic has the potential to provide improved work-life balance conditions, yet at the risk of widening the gender inequalities in the labor market. While these outcomes point to the threat that COVID-19 poses at rolling back the gains achieved in gender equality, the experiences under the pandemic conditions have also contributed to increased awareness around the globe of the importance of caring labor and care workers, establishing a solid basis for advocacy of gender equal care policies

The role of unemployment in wage determination: further evidence on the wage curve from Turkey

This paper presents an empirical estimation of the correlation between wages and regional unemployment rates in Turkey, more specifically it explores the role of regional unemployment rates in wage determination. The analysis builds upon a series of recent empirical studies on the wage-unemployment relationship, now commonly known as 'the wage curve', a downward sloping curve in wage-unemployment space. The existing studies are for most part in advanced market economies, while this paper presents one of the few attempts at a wage curve analysis within the context of a developing market economy. A cross-sectional estimation of micro level individual wage data for the Turkish labour market in 1994, suggest a statistically significant negative correlation between wages and regional unemployment rates. Separate regressions for men and women, however, show a wage curve to exist only in the male labour market. The study also presents the results on other variables of wage determination such as returns to schooling, returns to age, job tenure, gender, industrial and occupational affiliation of the worker, economic sector and union status.