How complete are labor markets in sub-Saharan Africa? Evidence from panel
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چکیده
We develop and implement new tests for the completeness of rural labor markets in sub-Saharan Africa. Our approach builds on the seminal work of Benjamin (1992), which uses consumer-producer households as a window into the functioning of rural markets. We use nationally representative panel data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda to extend a similar set of tests to a dynamic setting. We also develop a new set of empirical tests to distinguish between credit and labor market failures, and to determine whether labor market bottlenecks are on the demand or the supply side. We find evidence of market failures in all four countries. We find support for the presence of credit market failures in Malawi and Ethiopia, but not in Tanzania or Uganda. Results for Tanzania and Uganda are suggestive of constraints to labor demand, rather than to the supply of workers to family farms. These preliminary findings indicate that in these markets the problem is not that farms cannot find workers – it is that household members cannot find off-farm jobs. ∗We thank the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and the UK Department for International Development for funding through the GLM-LIC program. Initial work on this project took place as part of the Myths and Facts in African Agriculture project of the World Bank and African Development Bank. We thank Joshua Merfeld, Reuben Mutegi, and Audrey Lawrence for excellent research assistance. All errors are the responsibility of the authors. †University of Washington, Evans School of Public Affairs. Email: [email protected]. ‡University of Alabama. Email: [email protected] §University of Nairobi, Department of Economics. Email: [email protected].
منابع مشابه
How complete are labor markets in sub - Saharan Africa ?
We develop and implement new tests for the completeness of rural labor markets. Our approach builds on the seminal work of Benjamin (1992) and requires panel data with changes in household labor endowments over time. We show how the possibility of asymmetric responses to increases and decreases in labor endowments leads to tests of necessary conditions for a shortage or surplus in the labor mar...
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تاریخ انتشار 2015