Labor Market Dynamics in Romania During a Period of Economic Liberalization

In this paper, we estimate a model of labor market dynamics among individuals in Romania using panel data for three years, 1994 to 1996.Our motivation is to gain insight into the functioning of the labor market and how workers are coping during this period of economic liberalization and transformation that began in 1990. Our models of labor market transitions for men and women examine changing movements in and out of employment, unemployment, and self-employment, and incorporate specific features of the Romanian labor market, such as the social safety net. We take into account demographic characteristics, state dependence, and individual unobserved heterogeneity by modeling the employment transitions with a dynamic mixed multinomial logit.

Wage determination and gender discrimination in a transition economy : the case of Romania

The authors analyze wage determination and gender discrimination in Romania using the 1994 Romanian Household survey. They estimate wages for men and women in urban and rural areas using a Heckman selection model. They analyze gender discrimination in offered wages, to address the methodological shortcomings found in the literature. Increasing returns to education and experience are consistently significant for both men and women in urban and rural areas. Returns to education are greater in rural than in urban areas, especially for women. Labor markets are segmented regionally, probably as a result of the country's economic history, especially the spatial allocation of resources under a centrally planned economy. Only with economic liberalization has the specialization of specific regions translated into differences in regional performance and hence local economic differences. They found discrimination against women in both urban and rural labor markets, especially at low levels of education. The observed bias against women in urban areas is comparable to that found in other Western countries--but in the region's rural settings the bias is much greater than in the West. With the adjustment to market forces, as less-skilled workers face increasing difficulties in the region, women's relative wages may be expected to decline further. Discrepancy in pay also directly affects the level of pensions, unemployment benefits, and other means-tested benefits to workers, contributing to pauperization.Economic Theory&Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Labor Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies

Changes in inequality and poverty in Latin America: Looking beyond income to health and education

This paper uses Demographic and Health Survey data from six Latin American countries to analyze levels and trends of inequality for two important non-income measures of wellbeing, childrenz s stature and adult womenq s educational attainment. Our purpose is to determine whether the worrying trend of increasing income inequality in Latin America is also found in non-income dimensions of well-being. We find that it is not. Almost across the board, health inequality, measured by childreni s stature, and education inequality, measured by young womeni s years of schooling, have fallen in these countries in the late 1980s and 1990s, often dramatically. Further, by decomposing changes in non-income dimensions of poverty into shifts in the mean and changes in the distribution of health and education, we show that reduced inequality has contributed to significant reductions in education poverty, and to a lesser extent, health poverty. This, too, is a very different result from the income inequality literature.inequality, poverty, health, education, Latin America

Inequality and Poverty in Africa in an Era of Globalization: Looking Beyond Income to Health and Education

This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of wellbeing?education and health?in Africa. We expected to find, as we did in Latin America, that progress in the provision of public services and the focus of public spending in the social sector would contribute to declining poverty and inequality in health and education, even in an environment of stagnant or worsening levels of income poverty. Unfortunately, our results indicate that in the area of health, little progress is being made in terms of reducing pre-school age stunting, a clear manifestation of poor overall health. Likewise, our health inequality measure showed that while there were a few instances of reduced inequality along this dimension, there was, on balance, little evidence of success in improving equality of outcomes. Similar results were found in our examination of underweight women as an indicator of general current health status of adults. With regard to education, the story is somewhat more positive. However, the overall picture gives little cause for complacency or optimism that Africa has reaped, or will soon reap the potential benefits of the process of globalization.health, education, wellbeing, Africa

Expenditure incidence in Africa: microeconomic evidence

In this paper, we examine the progressivity of social sector expenditures in eight sub-Saharan African countries. We employ dominance tests, complemented by extended Gini/concentration coefficients, to determine whether health and education expenditures redistribute resources to the poor. We find that social services are poorly targeted. Among the services examined, primary education tends to be most progressive and university education is least progressive. The benefits associated with hospital care are also less progressive than other health facilities. Our results also show that, while concentration curves are a useful way to summarise information on the distributional benefits of government expenditures, statistical testing of differences in curves is important.

Robust Multidimensional Poverty Comparisons

We investigate how to make poverty comparisons using multidimensional indicators of well-being, showing in particular how to check whether the comparisons are robust to the choice of poverty indices and poverty lines. Our methodology applies equally well to either of what can be defined as "union" and "intersection" approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being. When one of two variables is discrete, our methods specialize to those that Atkinson (1991), Jenkins and Lambert (1993) and others have developed to deal with household composition heterogeneity. The results also extend the statistical results recently derived in Davidson and Duclos (2000) to cases where well-being is measured in two or more dimensions. We thus derive the sampling distribution of various multidimensional poverty estimators, including estimators of the "critical" frontiers of poverty lines above which multidimensional poverty comparisons are no longer ethically robust.Multidimensional Poverty, Stochastic Dominance

Polarization: Robust Multidimensional Poverty Comparisons

We investigate how to make poverty comparisons using multidimensional indicators of well-being, showing in particular how to check whether the comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures and to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines. In contrast to earlier work, our methodology applies equally well to what can be defined as "union", "intersection" or "intermediate" approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being. When one of two indicators is discrete, our methods specialize to those that have previously been developed to deal with household composition heterogeneity. To make these procedures of some practical usefulness, the paper is also the first to derive the sampling distribution of various multidimensional poverty estimators, including estimators of the "critical" poverty frontiers outside which multidimensional poverty comparisons can no longer be deemed ethically robust. The results are illustrated using data from a number of developing countries.Multidimensional Poverty, Stochastic Dominance

Robust Multidimensional Poverty Comparisons with Discrete Indicators of Well-being

This paper provides a method to make robust multidimensional poverty comparisons when one or more of the dimensions of well-being or deprivation is discrete. Sampling distributions for the statistics used in these poverty comparisons are provided. Several examples show that the methods are both practical and interesting in the sense that they can provide richer information than do univariate poverty comparisons.Multidimensional Poverty, Stochastic Dominance

Robust Multidimensional Spatial Poverty Comparisons in Ghana, Madagascar, and Uganda

We investigate spatial poverty comparisons in three African countries using multidimensional indicators of well-being. The work is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature in that we seek poverty orderings that are robust to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines and indices. In addition, we wish to ensure that our comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures for multiple welfare variables. In contrast to earlier work, our methodology applies equally well to what can be defined as "union", "intersection", or "intermediate" approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being. Further, unlike much of the stochastic dominance literature, we compute the sampling distributions of our poverty estimators in order to perform statistical tests of the difference in poverty measures. We apply our methods to two measures of well-being, the log of household expenditures per capita and children's height-for-age z-scores, using data from the 1988 Ghana Living Standards Survey, the 1993 Enquêtes Permanente auprès des Ménages i Madagascar, and the 1999 National Household Survey in Uganda. Bivariate poverty comparisons are at odds with univariate comparisons in several interesting ways. Most importantly, we cannot always conclude that poverty is lower in urban areas from one region compared to rural areas in another, even though univariate comparisons based on household expenditures per capita almost always lead to that conclusion.Multidimensional Poverty, Stochastic Dominance, Ghana, Madagascar, Uganda

CONSISTENT ESTIMATION OF LONGITUDINAL CENSORED DEMAND SYSTEMS

In this paper we derive a joint continuous/censored demand system suitable for the analysis of commodity demand relationships using panel data. Unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for using a correlated random effects specification and a Generalized Method of Moments framework used to estimate the model in two stages. While relatively small differences in elasticity estimates are found between a flexible specification and one that restricts the relationship between the random effect and budget shares to be time invariant, larger differences are observed between the most flexible random effects model and a pooled cross sectional estimator. The results suggest the limited ability of such estimators to control for preference heterogeneity and unit value endogeneity leads to parameter bias.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,