in the rates of participation of the old may indicate their need to provide or supplement household income with prolonged work. Thus, it may be more effective to target welldesigned unemployment insurance programs mostly to the less educated elderly, to cushion and reduce their longer unemployment spells, and to those of middle age despite their less severe umemployment situation.<sup>3 9</sup> Furthermore, the large contribution of informality to the soaring unemployment in Argentina warns that the concerns of massive layoffs resulting from productive restructuring and public sector retrenchment may have left too little attention to the situation of unprotected workers that lose their jobs in small firms wiped out by incoming national or transnational firms operating on a larger more efficient scale. T his stresses the well recognized need to find creative mechanisms to extend safety nets to these workers.

Perhaps too much emphasis has been put on disparities in access to education as the main culprit in the rise in wage inequality in some countries. Rising returns for professionals could reflect the scarcity of managers and other workers with specific skills to enact changes during periods of economic transformation. This calls for initiatives to give access to the poor to high quality education and training in specific skills. More importantly, our quantile results strongly suggest that an increase in within-group wage inequality may have been an important contributor to any observed rise in overall inequality.<sup>40</sup> If part of the quantile difference in wage premiums is due to discriminatory practices or location-specific advantages, other policies are warranted. Discriminatory practices may require changes in existing labor legislation and its application. If access to high quality jobs is determined by information asymmetries (e.g., due to geographic closeness), then a greater effort at disseminating information on available employment opportunities could contribute to more equal access to better jobs among workers from different socioeconomic statuses. Furthermore, the finding of swiftly rising wage premiums for new Argentine workers already located in more steady jobs over workers just entering new occupations (especially at the bottom quantiles) may be indicative of the instability of starting salaries of new entrants during economic transitions. Reemployment programs targeted to new workers, especially those who tend to have the lowest starting salaries, may offer a very cost-effective means to reduce wage disparities and smooth employment transitions.

Continuing economic restructuring may affect the income generation potential of males and result in more subtle negative impacts on social outcomes and perceptions that should not be ignored. Increasing and persistent unemployment and barriers to high quality employrnent have likely affected the capacity of some young men and displaced older workers to effect a "breadwinner" role in their current or prospective families (Barker, 1998). The potential link to increasing violence and criminality in the region calls for policy interventions such as progressive programs that help these and older men

> **39** This is not to say that the young should be excluded from such programs. Efficient considerations may still dictate warranting some coverage (e.g., of household heads) to moderate risk averse behavior and improve job matching.

> **40** The results of Montenegro (1999) also indicate that increasing earnings disparities in the eighties may have been in part associated with a large increase in the return to education of workers at the higher quantiles of the (conditional) wage distribution, and to increasing wage dispersion in white collar jobs compared to blue collar (controlling for education and experience).

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