post keynesianism meets feminist economics this article explores the relationships between post keynesian economics and feminist economics it distinguishes three key concepts in each tradition that recommend serious attention in the other tradition gender the household and unpaid work and caring as key concepts in feminist economics uncertainty market power and endogenous dynamics as core concepts in post keynesian economics this article will show with reference to the literature in which such cross fertilisation has been explored already how both traditions can be enriched from a stronger mutual engagement

embeddedness cooperation and popular economy firms in the informal sector this paper is motivated by empirical observations on popular economy firms pefs in the informal sector of santiago de chile these are labor managed firms embedded in popular milieu where cooperation between their members plays a central role this paper develops a partial equilibrium microeconomic theory of pefs first it endogeneizes the level of cooperation between the workers second it develops a static and a dynamic model to analyze whether embeddedness influences the behavior of the pef embeddedness is assumed to be captured by three different characteristics suggested by the empirical observations most of them influence the employment and income levels in the pef

entrepreneurial drain under moral hazard a high yield sector curse we describe a two sector general equilibrium model of productive sorting under output risk and incomplete information risk neutral entrepreneurial individuals can either produce alone or acting as employers insurers team up with risk averse non entrepreneurial individuals although the latter option has the potential to generate more surplus when effort is unobservable and risk is high the moral hazard problem in mixed matches may be too severe for mixing to be attractive to both risk aversion types leading to a segregated equilibrium in which risk averse individuals select low risk low yield activities an increase in the profitability of the riskier sector can then trigger a switch from a mixed to a segregated equilibrium and cause aggregate output to fall evidence from a panel of non oecd countries showing that the presence of uninsured small scale mining firms has a negative impact on the relationship between natural resource exports and agrarian productivity suggests that this high yield sector curse might be present in natural resource rich low income countries

sdg 8 decent work and economic growth a gendered analysis abstract sdg 8 calls for promoting sustained inclusive and sustainable economic growth full and productive employment and decent work for all even as it highlights the importance of labour rights for all it also makes visible some significant tensions we note for example that despite many critiques of narrow economic measures of growth the focus here remains on gdp and per capita growth this is problematic we argue because the gdp productive boundary excludes much of social reproductive work this puts sdg8 in tension with sdg 5 which calls for the recognition of the value of unpaid care and domestic work there has been a significant increase in the rate of working women in the formal and informal sector however there has not been a subsequent gender shift in the doing of social reproductive work in this paper we argue sdg 8 s focus on decent work and economic growth is inadequate that productive employment and decent work for all men and women by 2030 needs to take into account the value and costs of social reproduction we trace key historical debates on work to argue that both gender and labour rights have to underpin sdg 8 if its promise of inclusive sustainable and decent work is to be realized

capture by threat we analyze a simple stochastic environment in which policy makers can be threatened by nasty interest groups in the absence of these groups the policy maker s desire for reelection guarantees that good policies are implemented for every realization of the shock when pressure groups can harass the policy maker good policies will be chosen for only a subset of states of nature hence honest and able leaders might implement bad policies and needed reforms could be delayed in order to make good policies more likely the public will want to increase the cost of exerting pressure for nasty groups and provide rents to those in power this last result can be used to explain the existence of political parties they play a role resembling that of the supervisor in the literature on collusion in hierarchical agency a rational public may also choose to ignore negative media reports on a politician s personal life and in general elect strong political leaders the prevalence of coercive methods of infl

women s changing participation in the labor force a world perspective this paper describes how the composition of the labor force changes with economic development it considers recent trends in women s labor force participation and the type of jobs held in various sectors as national per capita income increases the paper notes that women are more likely to work in the family or informal labor market if the labor costs to firms exceed the opportunity costs of female labor to family enterprises firms are at a relative disadvantage compared with families in the employment of less experienced and less skilled labor presumably because their labor costs are affected by such regulations as minimum wage social insurance premiums and limits on firing in asia and africa an increase in the proportion of employment in firms within the major sectors accounts for most of the rapid growth in women s overall share of wage employment in latin america however growth in the proportion of firm employment has been slower than elsewhere and the share of women in wage employment has even fallen overall in several countries it is not unreasonable to assume that women have lost more than men from market regulations and distortions but little research has addressed this proposition if it is true however these interventions in the labor market may be responsible for slowing women s transition from nonmarket and family work to firm employment this in turn may affect the rate and structure of economic growth

estimating consumption deprivation in india using survey data a state level rural urban analysis before and during reform period this paper assesses deprivation in india employing a measure proposed by sitaramam and using consumption data at the household level as cereals constitute a staple food and form a major portion of expenditure on food the deprivation measure considered here is deprivation in cereal consumption the total expenditure at which the engel curve for cereals turns from concave to convex is taken as the cut off to determine the deprived households it is shown that cereal deprivation at the all india level exhibits a declining trend over the period 1987 88 and 1999 2000 in the rural sector while there is little change in the urban sector further this decline in cereal deprivation seems to have been slowing down during the reform period the estimates of deprivation are poorly correlated with the hci and pgi at state level both in rural and urban sectors they however have better temporal correlations with those poverty measures we offer some explanation for these observed differences in alternate deprivation indices the trends in cereal deprivation are accompanied in some cases by a decline in real terms in maximum cereal consumption of each group of consumers whether this is an improvement or otherwise of the living standards of the poor must await further analysis of per capita food consumption in general with an analysis of prices and quantities of various food items it is hoped that this kind of study on deprivation of essential commodities may increase our understanding of poverty and even suggest direct intervention strategies

third world indebted industrialization international finance and state capitalism in mexico brazil algeria and south korea the past fifteen years have seen two important developments in the international economic system the rapid industrialization of many less developed countries ldcs and their increasing indebtedness to private financial institutions massive bank loans have been used to fund industrial growth in many ldcs international financial markets have replaced multinational corporations as the third world s most important source of private foreign capital in four major borrowing countries mexico brazil algeria and south korea the process of indebted industrialization has its roots in the internationalization of finance the increasing role of the state and the use of funds raised on the international capital markets to finance industrial development the results include rapid expansions of ldc industrial production and ldc exports of manufactured products as well as the formation of an implicit partnership between private financial institutions and state capitalist elites in the third world

labor managed cooperatives and private firms in north central italy an empirical comparison the authors analyze the differences between the behavior of private firms and that of producer cooperatives in a matched sample of the two organizational types from the regions of emilia romagna and toscana in north central italy where producer cooperatives are numerous individual firm level surveys provide new detailed comparative data on key issues such as investment productivity wages employment and industrial relations differences between the two types of firm are found in labor relations employment pay production methods the relationship to the external market environment and the level of economic performance the authors find no significant differences in investment horizons or criteria for finance despite theoretical assertions to the contrary the cooperatives apparently have higher productivity more labor intensive production methods lower income differentials and a more tranquil industrial relations environment than the private firms

labor markets as gendered institutions equality efficiency and empowerment issues abstract labor markets are gendered institutions operating at the intersection of the productive and reproductive economies participation in labor markets does not automatically empower women reduction in gender differentials in earnings may be the result of harmonizing down rather than up discrimination against women may persist because in the absence of institutional changes it is profitable it is important to distinguish between static and dynamic and micro and macro efficiency labor market regulation has an important role to play in the institutional transformation needed to reconcile goals of efficiency and equality

trends countertrends and gaps in women s employment abstract the factors driving global integration namely trade expansion technological change and the internationalization of production have altered production patterns and changed the composition of output in both developed and developing countries as global patterns and modes of production have changed there has been a general shift away from agriculture toward industry and services along with these output changes have come significant changes in regional and national employment in developing and developed countries these changes span divergent trends on the one hand there is the increased availability of more and better quality employment as workers shift out of agriculture and subsistence production and into waged employment in the expanding manufacturing and service sectors on the other hand there have been sectors where the trend has been away from formalization toward the informalization and semi formalization of production activities and employment practices women have generally benefited from improvements in the world economy this article demonstrates however that patterns of employment and income generation among women often diverge however from global trends in important ways that suggest that the forces shaping global integration effect women differently the article frames a policy discussion that the international center for research on women led to debate the implications of recent trends in women s employment in the developing and developed world the six articles in this section represent this discussion they span a range of empirical and theoretical inquiry exploring global employment trends and highlighting changes in women s participation in formal and informal economic activities

industry and underdevelopment re examined recent work by lipton stewart warren and others has from differing standpoints called into question much of the conventional wisdom of the dependency school shared by my book industry and underdevelopment about the relationship between development and industrialisation four of these arguments that industrialisation is necessary to meet human needs that underdeveloped countries are in general not succeeding in industrialising that capital intensive technology is desirable and that industrialisation requires more autarky are re examined they are all found to be in need of considerable modification but the general lines of the proferred alternatives to them are for the most part not accepted either part of the problem is diagnosed as insufficient concern for the human consequences of actually existing industrialisations and too nationalistic a conception of socialism

credit markets in northern nigeria credit as insurance in a rural economy this article addresses the issues of imcomplete markets and imperfect information in the context of credit markets in rural northern nigeria in much recent theoretical literature the problems of moral hazard and adverse selection are assumed to be decisive for the organization of agrarian institutions in contrast it is found that in the four villages surveyed credit transactions take advantage of the free flow of information within rural communities information asymmetries between borrower and lender are unimportant and their institutional consequences the use of collateral and interlinked contracts are absent credit transactions play a direct role in pooling risk between households through the use of contracts in which the repayment owed by the borrower depends on the realization of random production shocks by both the borrower and the lender

the brother in law effect ordinarily labor market equilibrium implies that the marginal worker is indifferent to employment and that the employer is indifferent between equally productive employees when the marginal worker is indifferent to employment employer preferences do not matter if however the marginal worker strictly prefers to be employed the employer can give favors and may wish to do so even at some cost to efficient production not only may inefficient workers be employed but the employer may also choose to employ too many workers we refer to this as the brother in law effect when the brother in law effect is due to unionization employment of brothers in law leads to increased employment under some circumstances leading even to over employment relative to the workforce that would be employed without unionization if the employment effect is strong because brothers in law are relatively good workers nepotism improves efficiency if the employment effect is weak including in principal agent models where there are informational rents nepotism is inefficient

a decomposition method on employment and wage discrimination and its application in urban china 2002 2013 abstract labor market discrimination is an important issue in developing countries where path dependent institutions have been dominant while effective institutional arrangements and policies have been hidden by local customs and culture however the existing applications of classical blinder oaxaca decomposition face criticism for their imprecise understanding of the factors affecting institutional discrimination in labor markets as well as for their lack of power in formulating well targeted anti discrimination policies following oaxaca 1973 we propose a new method to decompose the total discrimination index tdi to analyze employment and wage discrimination in the labor markets of developing countries the tdi is decomposed into the employment discrimination index edi and the wage discrimination index wdi then into the underpayment index to majorities upi and the overpayment index to minorities opi we apply this method to the institutional discrimination against rural migrants in china s urban areas using national representative data from 2002 to 2013 we have found that 1 the tdi increased quickly after china entered the wto then dropped after anti discrimination policies were implemented 2 the tdi is mainly determined by the upi while the tdi s fluctuation is mainly determined by the wdi our method provides insights into the changing composition of employment and wage discrimination and their respective labor market outcomes in developing countries as a result appropriate policy measures may be developed accordingly

globalisation women s economic rights and forced labour economy s penetration by foreign direct investment by and large has no sta tistically significant impact globalisation might weaken the general bargaining position of labour such that outcome related la bour standards might suffer however being more open toward trade is likely to promote rather than hinder the realisation of t wo labour rights considered as core or fundamental by the international labour organisation namely the elimination of economic discrimination and of forced labour

the effect of trade openness on women s welfare and work life summary this study of 134 countries analyzes whether women are generally the losers or winners of globalization the results show that economic integration does not directly improve women s life expectancies women s access to primary and secondary education may improve slightly although women s welfare does not seem to improve more than that of men on the other hand economic integration does influence women s professional lives in developing countries trade openness increases female labor force participation in industrialized states it decreases the share of working women trade openness in developed countries increases the number of women employed in the service sector while in developing states it increases the number of women working in industrial jobs and in agriculture

the reconstruction of the supply side of the labour market the relative autonomy of social reproduction been replaced in recent years by a proliferation of theories about the family and its rela tion to the system of production 1 it is our contention that this work for the most part has done little to establish the family system as an interesting central and dynamic vari able for economic analysis this outcome however is the direct result of the application of two opposing but equally inappropriate methodologies for the analysis of the family system in this paper we examine the main approaches to the analysis of social reproduc tion using the position of women in the system of production and reproduction as the main example of existing work on social reproduction we show that across the whole spectrum of theoretical approaches from neoclassical to marxist and feminist broadly similar methodologies for analysing the relationships between the spheres of production and reproduction have been employed

dynamic behavior of a labor managed team an important result in the theory of the labor managed firm is that the firm reduces output when prices go up this issue is considered in a dynamic situation where a firm is defined as a team if the firm wants to grow it has to use existing resources which are used for current production in order to incorporate factors of production into the team it is shown that the long term steady state results remain as before but not the short term impact the labor managed firm will normally increase production when prices go up while the profit maximizing firm will reduce production copyright 1988 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

the poor and the social sectors during a period of macroeconomic adjustment empirical evidence for jamaica considerable uncertainty remains about the human impact of macroeconomic adjustment analysis of the impact of adjustment on the poor and on the social sectors is difficult because it involves evaluating a counterfactual situation in which households are affected by prices incomes and public services with the possibility of substantial substitutions all within an economywide framework with complicated concurrent and lagged interactions time series data for jamaica is utilized in this article to examine whether macroeconomic adjustment initiated in the early 1980s but intensified in 1984 85 was associated with significant deterioration in various indicators of health nutritional and welfare outcomes particularly among the poor although the authors find evidence of substantial cuts in governmental expenditures on social services there is little confirmation of significant short run deterioration in human capital indicators during the adjustment period

the structural constraints of the world economy on national political development this study asserts that there are no unilinear patterns of political or economic development common to the states of the world we seek to illustrate using a pooled time series analysis that there are at least three distinct paths of politico economic development these paths correspond to the successive asymmetric integration of different clusters of states into the world economy along each trajectory of development we find that the constellation of internal political and economic relationships is defended by employing an ideology of political or economic democracy

membership and employment in an egalitarian cooperative economic models of the labour managed firm often stress inefficiencies and perverse behaviour in his seminal work ward 1958 considers a firm in which dividend not profit is maximized dividend is defined as value added net of fixed costs divided by the number of workers for the short run problem with the capital stock fixed ward shows that the usual demand signals would induce perverse responses i e contraction expansion when demand increases decreases workers will not move between firms to equate marginal products of labour and the dividend maximizing firm will respond to an increase in fixed cost by increasing the number of workers these results are disconcerting in that they cast doubt on product market stability due to downward sloping supply curves on the achievement of an efficient allocation of resources and on the formulation of consistent policy prescriptions in a labour managed economy ward s fundamental result that dividend maximization leads to a contraction expansion of the number of workers in the firm as output price increases decreases is remarkably robust it has its analogue in the multi product firm domar 1966 it is not eliminated when labour leisure considerations are introduced ireland and law 1981 and it applies to variations in expected price when uncertainty is introduced bonin 1980 however the appropriateness of modelling the producer cooperative as a firm in which the number of workers can be varied freely to maximize dividend has been criticized robinson 1967 and vanek 1969 argue that a true collective would not dismiss some of the brethren in exchange for small increments in the income of the remaining members interestingly this solidarity position can be supported by the individual self interest maximizing behaviour of a representative member bonin 1981

the economic lives of the poor in what turned out to be a rhetorical master move the 1990 world development report from the world bank defined the extremely poor people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than 1 per day per person measured at the 1985 purchasing power parity ppp exchange rate in 1993 the poverty line was updated to 1 08 per person per day at the 1993 ppp exchange rate which is the line we use in this paper poverty lines have always existed indeed 1 per day was chosen in part because of its proximity to the poverty lines used by many poor countries 1 however the 1 a day poverty line has come to dominate the conversations about poverty to a remarkable extent

on union preferences and labour market models insiders and outsiders this paper constructs a model of trade union behavior in which there is a distinction between insiders and outsiders this is used to examine one of the most troublesome issues in macroeconomic theory namely the extent to which a rise in aggregate demand might generate wage increases rather than growth in employment a generalization of the most widely used union utility function is presented the analysis reveals the conditions under which insiders will agree to let outsiders into employment derives two step wage preferences and proves a new result on wage rigidity copyright 1987 by royal economic society

on the employment decision of a labour managed firm the conventional analysis of a variable membership labour co operative assumes that membership can be reduced if required to increase income per head see for example vanek 1970 this implies a highly inequitable treatment of those who are excluded compared with those who remain we prefer instead to consider a decision process suggested by steinherr and thisse 1979 which treats all members ex ante equitably we assume that a co operative first votes on whether to reduce membership or not and then allocates any resulting redundancies randomly in section ii we define a range of conditions in which a cooperative will not vote to reduce membership although contraction would raise income per head for those remaining since voters who face the possibility of exclusion will take this into account in section iii we present the implications of these results for the supply functions of the firm and show that supply depends on initial membership that supply curves may not be reversible and that they may contain discontinuities kinks and backward sloping segments even with a smooth underlying technology a more general conclusion to be drawn is that a satisfactory theory of labour managed firms should rest on an analysis of decision making procedures and not on the imputation of an arbitrary maximand to the firm as a whole

the political economy of public goods some evidence from india we are interested in how public goods get allocated by a centralized state we use data on public goods and social structure from parliamentary constituencies in rural india to understand the allocation of these goods over the 1970s and 1980s national policies and political agendas during this period emphasized universal access to basic amenities and financed a rapid expansion in rural infrastructure we find evidence of considerable equalization in many of these facilities reflecting perhaps the importance of these commitments among the historically disadvantaged social groups those that mobilized themselves politically gained relative to the others measures of social heterogeneity that have been emphasized in the recent empirical literature on public goods are relevant but not overwhelming in their importance

competition and corruption in an agency relationship abstract the paper reconsiders the relationship between competition and corruption in a model where corruption has solid informational foundations and where the regulatory response to the possibility of corruption is taken into account it is shown that the effect of greater competition on corruption depends on the complementarity or substitutability of the two instruments available to decrease information rents namely low powered incentives and greater competition the paper concludes with a brief empirical exploration of the relationship between competitiveness and corruption on african data

a dynamic model of trade union behaviour this paper constructs a dynamic model of trade union behavior in which union membership is endogenous unemployed workers are assumed to leave their union as they seem to in reality and the union must therefore solve an intertemporal optim ization problem the results imply that conventional static models ov erstate the distortions caused by monopoly unionism and that the rece nt empirical mod els of union behavior may be misspecified the paper s analysis can be seen as an attempt to construct a model of the pos t entry closed shop copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

income smoothing and consumption smoothing one way that risk averse households protect consumption levels is to borrow and use insurance mechanisms another way common in low income economies is to diversify economic activities and make conservative production and employment choices households thus tend toward limiting exposure only to shocks that can be handled with available credit and insurance typically both types of mechanisms are studied independently but much more can be learned by studying them together first we obtain a more complete picture of risks costs and insurance possibilities second it opens the way to considering biases in standard tests of credit and insurance

financial systems in northern thai villages field research attempted to measure the risky environments the information structures the institutions and the risk response mechanisms of ten villages in northern thailand various key features are then modeled in an abstract but realistic way either with a full information risk sharing model or an information constrained version of the same model observations from some of the villages seem consistent with one or the other of these models but in many of the villages one is left with risk response variations across households which suggest that pareto improvements are possible

property rights asset specificity and the division of labour under alternative capitalist relations is the division of labor under capitalism because of transaction and technological efficiency or because of inefficient capitalist property rights the answer of this paper is that under classical capitalism there is an inefficient division of labor because of underinvestment in asset specific labor which can be improved by expanding workers rights in two different ways defining company workers and unionized capitalism an implication of the analysis is that markets far from being the selection mechanism where efficient institutions evolve may imply the reproduction of inefficient property rights and be shaped by them copyright 1991 by oxford university press

the techno bureaucratic elite and the entrepreneurial state in dependent industrialization a common characteristic of dependent industrializing countries is a substantial direct entrepreneurial role for the state one explanation for this is that in dependent industrializing countries the system of allocation and production has been captured by a key group the techno bureaucratic elite the argument is that this elite lends its political support to the state in return for the state substituting as entrepreneur in the industrialization process in this article we analyze the theoretical implications of this explanation of the entrepreneurial state a formal model is constructed of the relationship between state entrepreneurship material consequences for the techno bureaucratic elite and important domestic and international constraints we then use deductive methods to analyze the logic of state entrepreneurship among other things we show how cyclical fluctuations in the global economy are reflected in constantly changing levels of state entrepreneurship and we investigate the consequences of alternative kinds of dependency syndromes for histories of entrepreneurial substitution and for streams of benefits to the techno bureaucratic elite it is demonstrated that there is an inverse relationship between the tendencies to reach stable levels of state entrepreneurship and the long term potential for economic growth

the profits of power land rights and agricultural investment in ghana we examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in akwapim ghana we show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output the intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual corresponds to that individual s security of tenure over those specific plots and in turn to the individual s position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots

an analysis of the principal agent problem most analyses of the principal agent problem assume that the principal chooses an incentive scheme to maximize expected utility subject to the agent s utility being at a stationary point an important paper of mirrlees has shown that this approach is generally invalid we present an alternative procedure if the agent s preferences over income lotteries are independent of action we show that the optimal way of implementing an action by the agent can be found by solving a convex programming problem we use this to characterize the optimal incentive scheme and to analyze the determinants of the seriousness of an incentive problem

testing between competing models of sharecropping the marshallian approach assumes a prohibitively high cost of monitoring the sharecropper s activities while the monitoring approach argues that landlords stipulate and effectively monitor sharecroppers activities i present new evidence using detailed data collected from eight indian villages most tenants own some land of their own this provides a controlled environment in studying the impact of contractual arrangements the differences in input and output intensities on owned minus sharecropped land of the same household are found to be sizable and significant suggesting a rejection of the monitoring approach and supporting the notion of the marshallian productive inefficiency of sharecropping

gender mainstreaming in finance ministries abstract ministries of finance appear largely to have escaped careful scrutiny in attempts to sensitize different divisions of government to gender concerns this paper shows three possible points of entry to engendering the work of ministries of finance at the level of ongoing macroeconomic management which includes the annual budget of the government and the fiscal deficit external and internal debt and the balance of payments at the level of structural reforms particularly deregulation liberalization and privatization which are intended to improve efficient resource use and eradicate poverty and in the specific context of credit liberalization and the provision of micro credit

economic transition and the motherhood wage penalty in urban china investigation using panel data china s economic transition has fundamentally changed the mechanisms for allocating and compensating labour this paper investigates how the economic transition has affected the wage gap between mothers and childless women in urban china using panel data for the period 1990 2005 the results show that overall mothers earned considerably less than childless women additionally the wage penalties for motherhood went up substantially from the gradualist reform period 1990 96 to the radical reform period 1999 2005 the results also show that that although motherhood does not appear to have a significant wage effect for the state sector it imposes substantial wage losses for mothers in the non state sector these findings suggest that the economic transition has shifted part of the cost of childbearing and rearing from the state and employers back to women in the form of lower earnings for working mothers copyright oxford university press

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

women and labor market changes in the global economy growth helps inequalities hurt and public policy matters this report examines the level and changes in female and male participation rates employment segregation and female wages relative to male wages across the world economy it funds sufficient evidence to support the view that labor markets in developing countries are transformed relatively quickly in the sense that gender differentials in employment and pay are narrowing much faster than they did in industrialized countries however the report evaluates the inefficiencies arising from persisting gender differentials in the labor market and finds them to be potentially significant the estimates also indicate that the resulting deadweight losses are borne primarily by women while men gain mainly in relative terms there are no real winners from discrimination the paper concludes that growth benefits women at large inequalities can have significantly adverse effects on welfare and market based development alone can be a weak instrument doe reducing inequality between the sexes to break the vicious cycle of women s low initial human capital endowments and inferior labor market outcomes compared to men s the report proposes greater access to education and training for girls and women enforceable equal pay and equal employment opportunities legislation a taxation and benefits structure that treats reproduction as an economic activity and women as equal partners within households and a better accounting of women s work to include invisible production

an income satiation model of efficiency wages efficiency wages are wages that exceed a worker s reservation wage a standard explanation for such wages is bonding high wages increase the cost of being discharged for misbehavior and so help ensure worker honesty a neglected alternative is satiation by decreasing the worker s marginal utility of income the high wage decreases the benefit from misbehavior satiation unlike bonding applies even in a one period model but it relies on the misbehavior having a monetary benefit and on at least part of the punishment being nonmonetary

cooperation harassment and involuntary unemployment an insider outsider approach the authors present a theory of involuntary unemployment which explains why the unemployed workers outsiders are unable or unwilling to find jobs even though they are prepared to work for less than the prevailing wages of incumbent workers in siders the outsiders do not underbid the insiders since were the y to do so the insiders would withdraw cooperation from them making their work unpleasant with harassment and thereby reducing the prod uctivity and increasing the reservation wages of the underbidders th e resulting labor turnover costs create economic rent which the insid ers tap in wage setting and as a result involuntary unemployment ma y arise copyright 1988 by american economic association

gender and trade aspects of labour markets we provide a comprehensive up to date review of the large body of theory and evidence on the linkages between trade liberalisation and gender inequality in income as well as two of the latter s key underlying determinants wages and employment on balance the evidence for developing countries points to an overall beneficial impact of trade expansion on female employment both relative to male employment and in absolute terms although largely concentrated in unskilled manufacturing by contrast the bulk of the evidence suggests a widening gender wage gap as a result of freer trade

gender markets and states a selective review and research agenda abstract this paper attempts to define a research agenda that will explore the relationships among gender markets and states taking account of the recent and continuing processes of market liberalization regionalization and transformation of the relations between states and societies it argues that in order to understand what market liberalization or the formation of regional economic blocs might mean for women one needs to look beyond market activity per se to nonmarket activity and to women s wellbeing more generally it selectively reviews some of the literature on structural adjustment and regional trading blocs in order to clarify underlying concepts and point to new directions for empirical research in the penultimate section it raises a set of policy and research questions on the role that women s non governmental organizations can play in shaping the emerging relationships between governments and the private sector

inequality as a determinant of malnutrition and unemployment policy this paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person s productivity is an increasing function of intake in the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small certain patterns of lorenz improving asset redistributions or nutrition transfers increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment copyright 1987 by royal economic society

imperfect information screening and the costs of informal lending a study of a rural credit market in pakistan many governments have perceived the rural moneylender as usurious this article takes a first step toward directly testing the validity of this view in a study of services costs and charges of fourteen informal market moneylenders and their clients in chambar pakistan the article examines whether the high implicit interest rates charged reflect the actual costs of operating in that market estimates of the resource costs incurred by informal lenders for screening pursuing delinquent loans overhead and cost of capital including unrecoverable loans suggest that lenders charges are equal to their average cost of lending but exceed their marginal cost this finding is consistent with the view that the informal credit market is characterized by excess capacity and monopolistic competition in the presence of imperfect information

a dynamic model of union membership and employment that it recognizes some link between present wage and employment levels and future membership and that it has an interest in the level of membership attained we model membership decisions with stochastic demand and a differential layoff rate for union and non union workers membership dynamics are behavioural in that membership increases when the utility of being a member exceeds the utility of not being a member the model permits a variety of possible relationships between employment and membership in the adjustment to steady state

how high are rates of return to fertilizer evidence from field experiments in kenya the idea that peasant farmers are rational profit maximizers has been a staple of development economics since theodore schultz 1964 it has also been influential in shaping policy for example agricultural experts have stressed the importance of fertilizer use in raising agricultural yields pointing to impressive results on experimental farms and to huge differences in agricultural productivity across countries with different levels of fertilizer use robert evenson and douglas gollin 2003 historically many countries subsidized fertilizer in response but economists have been skeptical of claims that farmers are leaving money on the table noting that fertilizer may not have the same returns on real world farms as on experimental farms that returns to fertilizer may be low for many farmers even if they are high on average tavneet suri 2007 that fertilizer may require complementary inputs or may be risky many countries have withdrawn or scaled back fertilizer psychology and development theory and experimental evidence

debt poverty and resource management in a rural smallholder economy this paper develops a model to capture the key features of poverty credit constraints and resource management faced by poor rural households we assume that due to the existence of asymmetric information and moral hazard the household faces an increasing cost of credit as its debt equity ratio rises a household exploiting a natural resource may fall into a poverty trap but only if it is unable to afford the increasing borrowing costs implied by increasing debt to allow it to avoid such a trap or if it discounts future utility so much that a balanced growth path cannot be financed at any level of long run borrowing in contrast along an optimal balanced growth path the household s asset wealth purchased inputs resource stock and consumption increase at the same constant rate however over the long run there may be carrying capacity limits that prevent the resource from improving further the household may then direct its savings to accumulating financial assets and eventually under certain conditions may become a net creditor with resource exploitation becoming a less and less important source of its income

popular economy in santiago de chile state of affairs and challenges do informal initiatives share a capitalist spirit of entrepreneurship this article attempts to answer this question using a popular economy analytical framework and focusing on the case of chile first we present the context of the research namely the economic and political evolutions in chile since the 1970s and their effects on the popular economy then we seek to answer the original question relying on in depth case studies of so called popular economy organizations our research shows that their socio economic logics significantly differ from those of the traditional capitalist firm our observations also suggest important differences between current and older initiatives 2014 elsevier ltd

competition and incentives with motivated agents a unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private nonprofits is the importance of mission as opposed to profit as an organizational goal such mission oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission this paper studies incentives in such contexts and emphasizes the role of matching the mission preferences of principals and agents in increasing organizational efficiency matching economizes on the need for high powered incentives it can also however entrench bureaucratic conservatism and resistance to innovations the framework developed in this paper is applied to school competition incentives in the public sector and in private nonprofits and the interdependence of incentives and productivity between the private for profit sector and the mission oriented sector through occupational choice jel d23 d73 h41 l31 the late twentieth century witnessed a historic high in the march of market capitalism with unbridled optimism in the role of the profit motive in promoting welfare in the production of private goods moreover this generated a broad consensus on the optimal organization of private good production through privately owned competitive firms when it comes to the provision of collective goods no such consensus has emerged debates about the relative merits of public and private provision still dominate this paper suggests a contracting approach to the provision of collective goods it focuses on two key issues how to structure incentives and the role of competition between providers at its heart is the idea that organizations that provide collective goods cohere around a mission 2 thus production of collective goods can be viewed as mission oriented

bureaucratic corruption and the rate of temptation do wages in the civil service affect corruption and by how much abstract this paper presents what is to our knowledge the first empirical estimate of the effect of pay in the civil service on corruption first we show that theory is ambiguous on the relationship between civil service pay and corruption then we examine the issue using a new data set on wages for low income countries we find evidence of a statistically and economically significant relationship between relative civil service pay and corruption in regressions based on cross country averages where we control for a wide array of variables the relationship implies that a rather large increase in wages is required to eradicate corruption solely by raising wages

optimal membership employment and income distribution in unionized and labor managed firms this article presents a static and dynamic intertemporal analysis of employment and income distribution in unionized and labor managed firms motivated by theoretical considerations and institutional features of western trade unions and labor managed firms we examine firms in which worker members share the risk of layoffs by acting as if compensating laid off members in the static framework we show that although the firms do not behave perversely their behavior depends crucially on the initial membership since the issue of optimal initial membership has been virtually ignored in the literature we analyze it next within a dynamic framework

what is middle class about the middle classes around the world we expect a lot from the middle classes jim frederick writing in time magazine in 2002 stated china s burgeoning middle class holds the key to the future of the country in a more academic vein easterly 2001 concludes based on a comparison of a large number of countries that countries that have a larger middle class tend to grow faster at least if they are not too ethnically diverse in another article birdsall graham and pettinato 2000 rue the shrinking of the middle class the backbone of both the market economy and of democracy in most advanced societies in the face of burgeoning globalization the economic historian david landes writing about the wealth and poverty of nations 1998 explains england s early ascendancy in terms of the great english middle class of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of course there is nothing new about this faith in the middle class it follows a long line of theorizing going back at least to max weber 1905 at least three distinct arguments are traditionally made in one new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from the middle class and create employment and productivity growth for the rest of society for a formalization of this argument see acemoglu and zilibotti 1997 in a second perhaps more conventional view the middle class is primarily a source of vital inputs for the entrepreneurial class it is their middle class values their emphasis on the accumulation of human capital and savings that makes them central to the process of capitalist accumulation for example doepke and zilibotti 2005 2007 the third view a staple of the business press emphasizes the middle class consumer the consumer who is willing to pay a little extra for quality in this view the middle class demand for quality consumer goods feeds investment in production and marketing which in turn raises income levels for everyone murphy shleifer and vishny 1989 1 this essay asks what we should make of these arguments in the context of today s developing countries starting from data on patterns of consumption and investment by the middle class we look for what is distinct about the global middle class especially when compared to the global poor defined as those whose per capita daily consumption valued at purchasing power parity exchange rates is below 2 a day who were the subject of a previous essay in this journal banerjee and duflo 2007b in particular is there anything special about the way the middle class spend their money earn their incomes or bring up their children

specialization household production and the measurement of economic growth our concern in this paper is with the measurement of economic growth or more precisely the mismeasurement of growth that may occur from ignoring household production as an economy develops production shifts from households to markets traditional measures of economic growth which ignore most household production may therefore be biased upward the existence of household production also complicates international comparisons of real gnp as there are significant differences in the relative size of the household sector across developed and developing economies there is an extensive empirical literature on the size of the household sector most estimates place the value of household production in the united states for recent years at 30 40 percent of gnp 2 previous studies have found that the relative size of the household sector has remained fairly constant over time implying that measured growth rates provide a reasonable proxy for overall growth rates existing estimates of household production however have little theoretical grounding for the most part they also ignore the use of capital in the household sector in addition most estimates relate to a single point in time 3 finally existing studies relate to time periods after which the large movements out of the household and into the market may have taken place in this paper we provide new estimates of the value added in household production for selected years from 1930 to 1985 we find that the relative size of the household sector in recent times is smaller than is commonly estimated we also find contrary to the results of others that the relative size of the household sector has fallen continuously since 1930 we conclude that real per capita output has grown from 1930 to 1985 at a rate that is significantly below the rate implied by conventional measures of output we develop in the next section a formal model of household production which we hope will help us to clear up such issues as the appropriate value to impute to household labor how to treat time spent transacting and how to deflate household production in order to obtain real output the model is not a general equilibrium model its role is not to derive implications for growth but rather to guide us in our accounting exercise

dependence on foreign investment and economic growth in the third world estimates of the extent to which third world countries have experienced slower rates of growth than those in the industrialized west since i960 indicate a weak relation between initial wealth and subsequent economic growth that follows an inverted u shape pattern while the lowest growth rates are found among the poorest countries of the third world the highest growth rates are found not in the industrialized west but in the wealthiest third world countries drawing on contending arguments associated with modernization and dependency perspectives the relationship between foreign investment and growth within the third world is examined results undermine the idea that foreign investment inhibits growth suggesting instead that flows of foreign investment may facilitate growth especially among the initially wealthier countries of the third world

risk financial markets and human capital in a developing country this paper explores the link between financial market incompleteness and human capital accumulation we examine how child school attendance responds to seasonal fluctuations in the income of agrarian households using panel data from rural india to pinpoint market imperfections we study responses to aggregate and idiosyncratic as well as to anticipated and unanticipated income shocks our main finding is that seasonal fluctuations in school attendance are a form of self insurance but one which does not result in a substantial loss of human capital on average

union membership and employment dynamics abstract this note examines the behavior of a monopoly union that cares about its future membership and recognizes the dynamic dependence of membership on employment a characterization is given both of the steady state and of the interdependent employment and membership dynamics out of that steady state

health and wealth among the poor india and south africa compared health and wealth are the two most important components of well being rankings of well being based on income will differ from more comprehensive rankings depending on the way that income and health are related there are strong bidirectional causal links between income and health so that we cannot understand either without understanding both what we call the wealthier is healthier hypothesis asserts both that income is the main determinant of health and that the international correlation between income and health is sufficiently tight for income rankings to indicate well being more broadly

implicit contracts a survey 7mplicit contracts resolve the distribution of uncertainty and utilization of specific human capital between risk averse workers and less risk averse firms incomplete contracts are required to yield involuntary layoffs in contract markets otherwise contracts are efficient and pareto optimal by construction there is a close relation between contract theory and neoclassical labor market theory contracts smooth consumption but increase the volatility of labor supply and labor utilization to demand disturbances because contractural insurance eliminates the income effects of socially diversifiable risks this result is similar to the intertemporal substitution hypothesis however the price mechanism in a contract is substantially different contracts embody a nonlinear two part pricing scheme the lump sum part allocates the income consumption consequences of risks and the marginal pricing part allocates production and labor utilization this implicit pricing mechanism is in all respects flexible though the observed average hourly wage combines both parts and may give the outward appearanceof rigidity furthermore the observed average wage rate in a contract does not reflect marginal conditions necessary for structural econometric estimation indivisibilities appear necessary to account for the split between work sharing and layoffs contracts with private information are also considered in the nonlinear pricing context this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a gendered value chain approach to codes of conduct in african horticulture codes of conduct covering the employment conditions of southern producers exporting to european markets mushroomed throughout the 1990s especially in the horticulture sector linking uk and european supermarkets with export firms in africa the majority of employment in this sector is informal a significant proportion of which is female this paper explores the gender sensitivity of codes currently applied in the african export horticulture sector from an analytical perspective that combines global value chain and gendered economy approaches through an analysis of these two approaches it develops a gender pyramid which provides a framework for mapping and assessing the gender content of codes of conduct the pyramid is applied to codes that cover employment conditions in three commodity groups and countries exporting to european markets south african fruit kenyan flowers and zambian vegetables and flowers it concludes that the gender sensitivity of codes needs to be greatly enhanced if they are to adequately address employment conditions relevant to informal and especially women workers

the demand for food and calories we investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural maharashtra in india we estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0 3 0 5 a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom the elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature in these indian data the calories necessary for a day s activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around

globalization and the empowerment of women an analysis of spatial dependence via trade and foreign direct investment summary this article tests the hypothesis that higher women s economic and social rights in foreign countries with which a country is connected via trade and foreign direct investment fdi spill over into higher rights among the laggards a phenomenon known as spatial dependence analyzing women s rights over the period 1981 2007 in a global sample and samples of countries at different stages of economic development we find consistent evidence for spill over effects via trade links with the exception of a sample of low income countries we also find some evidence for similar effects via fdi but only for economic rights and only in middle income countries

the double edged sword of legitimacy in base of the pyramid markets as compared to developed countries a much higher proportion of entrepreneurs within base of the pyramid bop markets operate unregistered businesses prior research has suggested that the primary cause of such informal activity in these settings is the general failure of weak institutions to provide sufficient resources to warrant formalization we attempt to extend such thinking by deconstructing the discrete and inter related effects of formal business registration on the level of resources obtained by entrepreneurs from financial labor and legal institutions within bop markets using a multi method approach involving 299 entrepreneurs within guatemala city our results suggest that being seen as a legitimate registered business can actually lead to both increased resource provision and resource appropriation more specifically adhering to the norms and rules prescribed by regulatory institutions within weak legal environments can convey positive signals of stability and profitability that both attract the desired attention from formal institutional actors as well as unwanted attention from criminals

tying odysseus to the mast evidence from a commitment savings product in the philippines we designed a commitment savings product for a philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology the savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism we conducted a baseline survey on 1777 existing or former clients of a bank one month later we offered the commitment product to a randomly chosen subset of 710 clients 202 28 4 percent accepted the offer and opened the account in the baseline survey we asked hypothetical time discounting questions women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current trade offs and hence potentially have a preference for commitment were indeed significantly more likely to open the commitment savings account after twelve months average savings balances increased by 81 percentage points for those clients assigned to the treatment group relative to those assigned to the control group we conclude that the savings response represents a lasting change in savings and not merely a short term response to a new product

empowerment and efficiency tenancy reform in west bengal the paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity theoretically the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the indian state of west bengal in the late 1970s suggests that tenancy reform had a positive effect on agricultural productivity there

taxes and bribery the role of wage incentives this paper presents a simple model to evaluate alternative payment schemes for tax inspectors in the presence of corruption we consider problems of both moral hazard which arises because taking bribes cannot be observed without costly monitoring and adverse selection since not all potential tax inspectors can be identified as being honest or dishonest we identify three wage regimes first one could pay the same wage that a tax inspector could earn elsewhere his reservation wage second one could pay a wage which solves the moral hazard problem i e deters bribery this we call an efficiency wage by analogy with recent models examined i n macro economics third the government could pay a wage below the reservation wage at which only the dishonest become tax inspectors the capitulation wage we make precise the conditions under which each yields the greatest amount o f tax revenues net o f administrative costs many countries in the developing world are undergoing structural adjustment programmes which require fundamental fiscal changes outside agencies advise restoration of budget balance a task which involves expenditure cuts and tax increases the treatment of public employee pay scales often poses a particular dilemma i n this process wages and salaries are a significant component of government expenditures and one important question concerns the extent to which wages rather than employment cuts should be used to save money there is sometimes a reluctance to advocate wage cuts stemming in part from a feeling that this might impair the performance of the public sector hence tanzi 1990 argues that a policy of wage cutting is likely to increase the inefficiency of public sector employees especially at a time when the public sector is expected to play a larger role in restructuring the economy p 16 in the context of tax collection the issue is particularly pressing given the need to raise more tax revenues a reduction in efficiency in this branch of the government i s likely t o mean that fewer returns are processed and when individuals living standards are squeezed their incentive to accept bribes in lieu o f collecting taxes i s increased o n this count i t i s even sometimes suggested that wages of tax inspectors should be increased to aid the effort to the comments of henry bienen john hey and two anonymous referees have been helpful in revising this paper the authors are also grateful t o the john m olin program for the study o f economic organization and public policy at princeton university and the pew charitable trusts for financial support mclaren also acknowledges support from the international finance section of princeton university none of the above should be implicated in any way see for example goode 1984 chapter 1 3 and gould and amaro reyes 1983

dynamics and asymmetric adjustment in insider outsider models this paper analyzes the time consistent and efficient solution for wages and employment in intertemporal insider outsider models of bargaining with endogenous membership when the reservation wage is made endogenous in a general equilibrium context insider outsider models can generate a fundamental asymmetry in the adjustment of employment to the steady state while upturns are gradual severe downturns are characterized by a sharp drop in employment obtained by laying off workers further reductions in employment are achieved solely through quits copyright 1992 by royal economic society

wealth health and health services in rural rajasthan what are the determinants of health and of well being income and wealth are clearly part of the story but does access to health care have a large independent effect as the advocates of more investment in health care such as the world health organization s commission on macroeconomics and health commission on macroeconomics and health 2001 have argued this paper reports on a recent survey in a poor rural area of the state of rajasthan in india intended to shed some light on this issue where there was an attempt to use a set of interlocking surveys to collect data on health and economic status as well as the public and private provision of health care

the structural location of third world states within the international division of labor this study attempts to determine the factors that affect a third world country s role in the international division of labor as measured by the degree of processing of its exports in 1980 competing hypotheses arising from the classical and neoclassical economic neo marxist and modernization literatures are tested by using a cross sectional design in which the units of analysis are third world states for which comprehensive data could be collected the findings suggest that a number of states have ascended the hierarchy of the international division of labor through a process of indebted industrialization the present study provides empirical support for frieden s 1981 contention that international banking capital rather than direct transnational investment has been relied upon by proactive third world states in their effort to diversify their exports by developing more advanced production processes

the theory of the labour managed firm revisited the voluntary interactive approach membership in the authors labor managed firm is determined in the long run by expected income maximization in the short run upon the realization of output price each member may leave the labor managed firm however a decision to leave when the entire membership quits is associated with fixed cost this arrangement ensures ex post egalitarianism and sense of job security the authors short run result is that employment does not exhibit a perverse response to price variations the long run result is that their labor managed firm is more populous than the illyrian firm and may even be more than its capitalistic twin copyright 1993 by royal economic society

choosing agents and monitoring consumption a note on wealth as a corruption controlling device there are a large number of cases where corruption has been discovered when investigating levels of consumption that appear to be hard to justify the informativeness of an agent s level of consumption depends on his legal income and initial level of wealth as conspicuous consumption by wealthy agents leads to little updating of the principal s belief about their honesty this introduces a tendency to prefer poor agents as they are easier to monitor more generally we describe the basic problem of choosing agents and monitoring consumption with the aim of reducing corruption and discuss features of the practical applications castrated slaves called eunuchs were employed by sultans to guard their harems this solution to a particularly distressing principal agent problem is one instance of a general strategy that can be called choosing agents in this strategy the principal selects an agent to whom he is about to delegate a task based on an observable characteristic in the standard agency model it is clear that the agent s degree of risk aversion can be costly to the principal perhaps because of the difficulty in observing risk aversion few economists have emphasised the potential benefits of using particular types of agents an exception is schelling 1960 who discusses the use of agents with a low personal cost of conflict and mentions the strategic advantages of delegating authority to a military commander of known motivation a subsequent paper by vickers 1985 emphasises the potential value of hiring a manager who is committed to maximise the company s sales instead of profits similarly rogoff 1985 analyses the benefits of delegating the conduct of monetary policy to a conservative central banker in a setting where there is time inconsistency while rotemberg and saloner 2000