[Review of the book \u3ci\u3eIncome Distribution in Less Developed Countries\u3c/i\u3e]

[Excerpt] This book by R. M. Sundrum, a professor at the Australian National University and former director of the World Bank, is a compilation of issues, ideas, and data on income distribution in less developed countries (LDCs). Each chapter or section has something meaningful to say, and for this reason the book bears careful study. However, no overarching theme or approach is apparent, so the reader is likely to come away with numerous small lessons about distribution and development but few larger conclusions

Labour Market Modelling and the Urban Informal Sector: Theory and Evidence

[Excerpt] The purpose of this paper is to assess the compatibility between theoretical models of the urban informal sector (UIS) and empirical evidence on the workings of that sector in the context of developing countries\u27 labour markets. My major point is that although the UIS is an excellent idea which has served us well in the 1970s and 1980s, we have need in the next round of research to refine our terminology and our models in light of empirical findings which have come to the fore in the interim. I would contend that what empirical researchers label the informal sector is best represented not as one sector nor as a continuum but as two qualitatively distinct sectors. Wage employment or self-employment in small-scale units may be better than or worse than employment in the formal sector. This is not a new point: diversity of earning opportunities and other job characteristics within the informal sector has long been noted — among other places, in the pathbreaking work of Hart (1973) and in the critiques of the informal sector concept by Bienefeld and Godfrey (1975), the ILO Sudan Report (1976), Standing (1977) and Sinclair (1978). But only recently has this view come to the fore: A third point in which agreement has been reached concerns the degree of heterogeneity within the informal sector. Contrary to the prevailing image of a decade and a half ago to the effect that the informal sector was of a homogeneous nature, it is clear today that there are different segments within this sector (Tokman, 1986, p. 13)

A Discussion of Social Protection and Private Insurance

[Excerpt] This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking paper, informative and interesting. I learned a lot from reading this and have already passed it on to others. In my comments, I would like to do four things: highlight the major points and the rationale for them, raise a few quibbles, put forth some additional issues, and propose a possible resolution of a dilemma raised in the paper. But let us first try to be clear about what we are talking about. Professor Pestieau characterizes social insurance as being mandatory, universal, and redistributive. I would define it slightly differently: “Social insurance is a state-run or state-mandated system that is mandatory and universal.” Must it be redistributive? I would say that it may or may not be ex ante in an expected value sense. But of course, social insurance will surely be redistributive ex post once losses are incurred

Rural-Urban Migration, Urban Employment and Underemployment, and Job Search Activity in LDCs

[Excerpt] In this paper, we shall present a formal theoretical mode with which to analyze the equilibrium allocation of the labor force between labor markets. Our basic premise is that the same kinds of forces that explain the choices of workers between the rural and urban sectors can also explain their choices between one labor market and another within an urban area and are probably made simultaneously. The decision-makers -- be they individuals or family units are presumed to consider the various labor market opportunities available to them and to choose the one which maximizes their expected future income

Taiwan’s Changing Employment and Earnings Structure

[Excerpt] In its determined pursuit of economic development throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, Taiwan consistently succeeded in achieving growth rates that were amongst the highest in the world; however, in tandem with such growth, a number of significant changes also took place in the island\u27s labour market. This chapter begins by highlighting some of the most important of these aggregate changes, as follows: (i) the achievement, and subsequent maintenance of, essentially full employment; (ii) improvements in the overall mix of jobs, in particular, a steady reduction in the share of agricultural employment to total employment, a very important shift given that agriculture remains one of the lowest-paying sectors in the Taiwanese economy; (iii) a rise in the share of wage employees, and, in consequence, a fall in the share of own-account work and unpaid family work; this represents another important shift, since wage employees in Taiwan enjoy much higher standards of living than own-account workers and unpaid family workers; (iv) an increase in the share of professional positions and other high-level jobs; a further significant and valuable development, because these are quite clearly the best-paying jobs; (v) real improvements in the educational level of the labour force as a whole; and (vi) a rise in real earnings throughout every sector of the economy, with both male and female earnings having risen at the same pace, in both farm and non-farm households. In addition to all of these changes, real earnings across the entire Taiwanese economy have doubled every ten years, absolute poverty has fallen sharply and the Gini coefficient of individual earnings has remained essentially constant, indicating that income inequality remains strong (further details on all of the above developments are provided in the Appendix, Tables A2.1-A2.7). This chapter sets out to present brief analyses of the changes that have taken place in Taiwan between 1976 and 1993

[Review of the book \u3ci\u3ePersonnel Economics\u3c/i\u3e]

[Excerpt] What is personnel economics? Despite its name (non-economists may be put off by the use of the word “personnel,” which was left behind by what is now called human resource management about a quarter century ago), personnel economics deals with issues of fundamental importance in the workplace. As the editors explain in the introduction, “The literature is distinguished from other parts of labour economics primarily by its focus on problems that are central to business.” Thus, personnel economics is economics, it is that part of economics that deals with workplace issues, and it is firmly grounded in labor economics. Whether you call it personnel economics, workplace economics, an economic approach to human resource management, or something else, the field is breaking exciting new ground, asking questions that simply were not asked when I and others of my academic generation were learning labor economics

A Public Lecture: Labour Markets and Economic Development

[Excerpt] I want to put forward three propositions to you based on decades of work in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. First, economic development can be (but need not be) a win-win-win situation - for businesses, for individuals and groups of individuals, and for governments and non- governmental organisations (NGOs). Second, the labour market can (but need not) serve as an effective mechanism for contributing to economic growth and for transmitting the gains from economic growth. And third, in both of these areas, whether a country experiences the more favorable set of outcomes or the less favorable ones reflects a) its choice of policies, which in turn can be influenced, for better or for worse, by b) how it specifies its economic development agenda

An urban vs. rural job satisfaction comparison: state-federal based vocational rehabilitation counselors

Includes bibliographical references

[Review of the book \u3ci\u3eThe Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia\u3c/i\u3e]

[Excerpt] This slim and eminently readable volume presents the 1990 Edwin O. Reischauer lectures delivered by Ezra Vogel, the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University and a leading scholar on Asia. In the first chapter Vogel establishes the context for the experiences of the late late industrializes . Japan and the Four Little Dragons (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan). The next three chapters are devoted to the experiences of Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively. The last chapter offers an explanation for the dragons\u27 successes

Who Benefits from Economic Development? - A Reexamination of Brazilian Growth in the 1960\u27s

[Excerpt] The purpose of this paper is to reexamine one of these two challenges, namely, the distributional impact of Brazilian economic growth during the 1960\u27s. My results lead to a quite different interpretation from the conventional one. I will show that the poor in Brazil did participate in the rapid economic growth of the decade. Estimates presented below indicate that average real incomes among families defined as poor by Brazilian standards increased by as much as 60 percent while the comparable figure for nonpoor families is around 25 percent. However, since nonpoor families receive incomes which are much greater than those of poor families, the bulk of the growth of national income over the decade was received by families whose incomes placed them above the official poverty standard. Thus, it would be incorrect to say either that 1) in achieving a high rate of economic growth in Brazil the rich got absolutely richer while the poor got absolutely poorer, or 2) the incomes of poor families increased more slowly (percentagewise) than those of nonpoor families. These and other findings are presented below in Section II, and some of the reasons for the observed changes are discussed in Section III. In assessing the distributional consequences of Brazilian economic growth, this study explicitly adopts an absolute poverty approach. In so doing, it is at odds with the bulk of the economic development literature, which while urging a poverty focus, has long relied on measures of relative income inequality and Lorenz curves. Thus, this paper does not merely offer one more measure ; it is, rather, the use of a different type of measure that causes the divergent results. The paper concludes in Section IV by reviewing the principal findings and exploring some further questions of more general applicability raised by the Brazilian debate