Women in the LAC Labor Market: The Remarkable 1990’s

We examine levels and trends of labor market outcomes for women in the 1990’s using household survey data for 18 Latin American countries covering several years per country. The outcomes we analyze include labor force participation rates, the distribution of employment of women across sectors of the economy (formal versus informal) and across industries (agriculture versus non-agriculture), unemployment, and earnings. Overall we document substantial progress made by women in many areas. The gender wage gap is closing steadily in Venezuela, Costa Rica, Brazil and Uruguay, while Colombian women now enjoy higher earnings than those of men. Women’s share of household labor earnings rose from 28% in the early 1990’s to 30% in the late 1990’s. Regarding the quality of jobs, we examine self-employment and employment in small forms as possible indicators of employment in the informal sector. There is no evidence of a systematic increase in self-employment nor in employment in small firms, and contrary to findings by the ILO, we find that the share of female employment accounted by domestic servants did not increase in the 1990’s. Perhaps the salient development of the 1990’s for women in LAC countries was the brisk-paced, secular rise in their labor force participation rates. We examine this development from several angles. We explore the Singh-Goldin-Durand hypothesis that women’s work status changes with economic development. Mammen and Paxson (2000) examine this hypothesis using data for 90 countries, and find that female participation of 45-59 year olds follows a U-shaped profile, with rates rising with GDP per capita increases above $3000. We find that female participation in LAC does not follow the Mammen-Paxson pattern. Next, we examine the role of schooling in explaining the increase in female labor force participation in LAC countries. We find that increases in female schooling account for 30% of the overall increase in female participation rates. The remaining 70% is explained by increases in participation rates at given schooling levels. Finally, we analyze the role of wages, especially the returns to different schooling levels, as a partial explanation for the pattern of changes in labor force participation rates. All of these findings suggest a fair degree of change in the role of women within households and in the labor market. We conclude that the macro economic picture of stagnation for LAC in the 1990s masks non-trivial developments in the division of labor and time allocation by gender.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39885/2/wp500.pd

Research, Extension, and Information: Key Inputs in Agricultural Productivity Growth

The objective of this paper is to examine how economists have perceived the contributions of agriculture to the economic development process and then to present the case for the critical role that research, extension, and information can play in agricultural productivity growth and thus in economic development, particularly in low income countries. After a brief presentation of the framework commonly used to examine productivity growth, a distinction is made between technological change and technical efficiency. This distinction is crucial for policy purposes because the major impetus behind technological change are research and development, while education and experience are critical to improving managerial capabilities to make efficient use of a given technology. Empirical findings concerning the returns on agricultural research, with special attention to studies that have focused on Pakistan, are discussed. The paper then offers an overview of alternative methodologies available to measure technical efficiency, summarises the empirical literature, and finally focuses on studies dealing with Pakistani agriculture. Once it is established that improvements in technical efficiency could contribute significantly to increases in farm output and income, the discussion moves to some issues that have implications for the measurement and potential improvement of farm efficiency. An overview of a model of privatised extension services, currently being applied in some Latin American countries and which could have some relevance to conditions in Pakistan and elsewhere, is provided. The paper ends with the contention that significant improvements are needed in the collection and organisation of farm production data if we are to advance our understanding of the drivers of productivity growth at the farm level

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY AND OFF-FARM LABOR DECISIONS BY HEADS AND SPOUSES IN NICARAGUA: A SEMIPARAMETRIC ANALYSIS USING PANEL DATA

The objective of this paper is to analyze the determinants of off-farm labor supply by heads of household and their spouses in Nicaragua. Using a three-year balanced panel dataset, we refine the approach introduced by Jacoby (1993) and Skoufias (1994) to estimate shadow wages and shadow income, and we also apply the semiparametric approach developed by Kyriazidou (1997) to panel data which mitigates biases not only from some key individual and farm time-invariant characteristics but also from sample selection. The main findings suggest that the shadow wages and shadow income of household heads and their spouses play a major role in the supply of labor to off-farm activities. When the marginal productivity of agricultural households goes up, there is a reduction in hours allocated to off-farm activities. We also find that education, age, remittances, household size, and whether sons and daughters work are related to off-farm labor supply, with significant differences between their effect on heads and their spouses.

RATES OF RETURN TO PRIVATE AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION: EVIDENCE FROM TWO FARM MANAGEMENT CENTERS IN EL SALVADOR

This paper evaluates the economic and the financial viability of implementing private farm management centers (FMC) in El Salvador. In doing so, an ex ante cost-benefit analysis is performed. The results of this analysis suggest that a combination of better farm prices (paid and received), reallocation of resources, and crop diversification that would be promoted by a FMC can lead to an increase in farm level profits that is sufficient to cover the operation of the center and to still generate net gains in household income.Farm Management,

A failed platform: the Citizen Consensus Conference travels to Chile

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.This article starts by reviewing the setbacks that the recent Science and Technology Studies literature has identified in the functioning of technologies of democracy, the different arrangements that look to enact deliberation on technoscientific issues. Putting a focus on the Citizen Consensus Conference, it then proposes that several of these setbacks are related to the kind of "work" that these technologies are expected to do, identifying two kinds of it: performing a laboratory-based experiment and constituting a platform for the dissemination of facts. It then applies this framework to study a Citizen Consensus Conference carried out in Chile in 2003. After a detailed genealogy of the planning, implementation and afterlife of this exercise, the article concludes that several of the limitations experienced are derived from a "successful outcome" conceived as solely running a neat lab-based experiment, arguing for the need to incorporate its functioning as a platform with all the associated transformations and messiness.BMBF, 01UU0906, Innovation in Governanc

A LINEAR PROGRAMMING ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIES OF SIZE AND PROFITABILITY IN VEGETABLE PRODUCTION

Crop Production/Industries,

Women in the LAC Labor Market: The Remarkable 1990’s

We examine levels and trends of labor market outcomes for women in the 1990’s using household survey data for 18 Latin American countries covering several years per country. The outcomes we analyze include labor force participation rates, the distribution of employment of women across sectors of the economy (formal versus informal) and across industries (agriculture versus non-agriculture), unemployment, and earnings. Overall we document substantial progress made by women in many areas. The gender wage gap is closing steadily in Venezuela, Costa Rica, Brazil and Uruguay, while Colombian women now enjoy higher earnings than those of men. Women’s share of household labor earnings rose from 28% in the early 1990’s to 30% in the late 1990’s. Regarding the quality of jobs, we examine self-employment and employment in small forms as possible indicators of employment in the informal sector. There is no evidence of a systematic increase in self-employment nor in employment in small firms, and contrary to findings by the ILO, we find that the share of female employment accounted by domestic servants did not increase in the 1990’s. Perhaps the salient development of the 1990’s for women in LAC countries was the brisk-paced, secular rise in their labor force participation rates. We examine this development from several angles. We explore the Singh-Goldin-Durand hypothesis that women’s work status changes with economic development. Mammen and Paxson (2000) examine this hypothesis using data for 90 countries, and find that female participation of 45-59 year olds follows a U-shaped profile, with rates rising with GDP per capita increases above $3000. We find that female participation in LAC does not follow the Mammen-Paxson pattern. Next, we examine the role of schooling in explaining the increase in female labor force participation in LAC countries. We find that increases in female schooling account for 30% of the overall increase in female participation rates. The remaining 70% is explained by increases in participation rates at given schooling levels. Finally, we analyze the role of wages, especially the returns to different schooling levels, as a partial explanation for the pattern of changes in labor force participation rates. All of these findings suggest a fair degree of change in the role of women within households and in the labor market. We conclude that the macro economic picture of stagnation for LAC in the 1990s masks non-trivial developments in the division of labor and time allocation by gender.labor force participation, earnings, women, Latin America

Violencia y subjetividad : la construcción de la peligrosidad

Esta ponencia es parte de lo producido en el marco del proyecto de investigación "¿Quién es peligroso? Una aproximación a las prácticas violentas en territorios urbanos fragmentados de la provincia de San Juan". En dicho proyecto se seleccionaron como territorios objeto de estudio dos barrios pertenecientes al departamento Rawson, de características contrastante: uno de mayor antigüedad, el barrio Güemes, y otro más nuevo, el barrio La Estación. Ambos son barrios que si bien tienen en común una gran conflictividad, los diferencia la alta estigmatización del segundo en relación al primero.Fil: Ureta, Adriana Alime. Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Instituto de Investigaciones Socieconómicas.

Discursive structure of hypertextual news: the importance of related and documented information

Este artículo examina los cambios que experimenta el quehacer periodístico en el entorno red, tratando de demostrar que la aplicación del hipermedia en la configuración de las noticias de portada favorece la práctica de un periodismo mejor contextualizado. No en vano, la posibilidad de organizar y relacionar distintas informaciones supone uno de los aspectos claves del periodismo en Internet, capaz de ofrecer a la audiencia un punto de vista más completo de los acontecimientos que suceden en el mundo. Según lo expuesto, este trabajo se centra en dos dimensiones de las noticias hipertextuales. De una parte, plantea hasta qué punto la prensa digital aprovecha las herramientas multimedia disponibles (texto, audio, imágenes, gráficos, etc.) para la elaboración de sus principales informaciones de portada. Por otra parte, pretende describir las ventajas de la estructuración hipertextual a la hora de ofrecer al lector una información contextual más completa sobre los principales acontecimientos del día.This article examines the storytelling transformation of journalism in an online environment, by demostrating that there is an innovative form of hypermedia news that can be describedas better contextualizad journalism. In fact, the possibility of linking so much information inan organized manner determines the nature of digital journalism, which offers the audiences amore complete picture of what happened. Therefore, the paper focuses on two dimension of contextualizad online news. On one hand, it studies up to what extent hypernews take advantage of multimedia storytelling tools (text, audio, video and graphics) to tell each story in the most suitable way. On the other hand, it pretends to determine the advantage of the hypertext structuration in associating multiple online contents. With this aim, the paper analizes hypertext use in relevant news events presented on the frontpage, where contents are often made as accurate and meaningful as possible