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Poverty & Growth blog - - Building Capacity to Reduce Poverty

Summer break
We are going to be away for a while. The "Fridays Academy" and other topics will be back in this blog very soon. Have a nice Summer.

Fridays Academy: Gender and the Labor Market

From Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Wage Rates

Continuing and persistent gender inequalities in wages suggest that the labor market is not operating freely. One reason may be differences in bargaining power between men and women and the different obligations that the individual sexes face. For example, the reservation wage for women is often lower than that for men. This may reflect the lower mobility that women have because of family obligations. In effect women are price takers in the labor market. This is especially true in developing economies where most times agricultural wages paid to women are lower than those paid to men, even for the same work.

Fridays Academy: Gender and the Labor Market

From Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Unemployment Rates

The figure below examines world and regional unemployment rates by sex for 2006. Globally women were more likely to be unemployed compared with men. Female unemployment in 2006 was 6.6 percent compared to 6.1 percent for men. Furthermore, the 2006 female unemployment rate increased from 6.3 percent in 1996. According to the ILO (2007) there were a total of 81.8 million women who were willing to work and actively looking for work without a job; up 22.7 percent from 10 years earlier.

World and Regional Unemployment Rates by Sex, 2006.

Source: ILO (2007)

Further disparity exists when comparing female youth unemployment – those aged 15-24 years. Roughly 35.6 million young women were seeking employment in 2006. And while noting that youth unemployment is most times higher than adult unemployment rates, we see from the figure below that female youth unemployment rates are far higher than male youth in five of the regions considered – Central and Eastern Europe (non-EU and CIS), South East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Middle East and North Africa.

Fridays Academy: Gender and the Labor Market

As usual on Fridays, from Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Skills levels

Feminization of Poverty

The International Poverty Centre has just published a one-pager on the Feminization of Poverty, by Marcelo Madeiros and Joana Costa.

The “feminization of poverty” is an idea that dates back to the 1970s. It was popularized at the start of the 1990s, not least in research by United Nation agencies. The concept has various meanings, some of which are not entirely consistent with its implicit notion of change. We propose a definition that is in line with many recent studies in the field: the feminization of poverty is a change in poverty levels that is biased against women or female-headed households.

Read more on Gender and Poverty in our current Fridays Academy series, every Friday in this blog.

Fridays Academy: Gender and the Labor Market

From Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Labor Force Participation Rates

The labor force participation rate (LFPR) is the share of employed plus unemployed people as a proportion of the working-age population. It indicates how many people of working age are actively participating in the labor market. The female LFPR indicates how many women of working age are active in the labor market. This proportion has been increasing in recent times and represents a way in which women can use their potential in the labor market to achieve economic independence (ILO, 2004).

The total female labor force was 1.2 billion in 2006, up from 1.1 billion a decade earlier, see the table below. Moreover, the gap between the male and female labor force participation rates also narrowed over the period. In 1996 there were 66 active women per 100 active men; by 2006 this number had increased to 67 (ILO, 2007). Over the 10-year period, the female LFPR declined to 52.4 in 2006 from 53 percent in 1996. The ILO attributes this to two facts - first, the increasing numbers of young women in education and second, the increasing representation of older women in the labor force.

World Bank's Young Professionals Program 2009

The World Bank is accepting on-line applications for the 2009 Young Professionals Program selection.

Deadline to apply is July 15th, 2008

Neuroeconomics

Introduction

In classical economic theory, the consumer is assumed to be a rational decision maker who makes choices to maximize his utility given his budget constraints. The consumer is also assumed to make intertemporal choices about savings, education, work effort, career and health care, after weighing in the opportunity cost of his funds. The classical economic model is modeled on the basic economic principles that consumers are rational and that they are equipped with immutable logic to further their best interests. As a natural corollary, classical economic thought would predict that consumers would save for their retirement, take only loans that they can afford to repay regularly over their lifetime, and consume the quantity of goods and services that balances their intertemporal budget constraints.

What then explains the apparently illogical behavior of consumers tossing coins into a slot machine without having any expectations of winning, or splurging their savings on holidays they can ill afford rather than saving for retirement, or even, successively refinancing their homes and indulging in conspicuous consumption while knowing fully well that either the unpredictable housing or labor markets makes repayment of debts very difficult? These decisions of consumers are not rational purchasing decisions and contrary to classical economic thought. This has led to an emerging field in economic thought and research, called neuroeconomics, that suggests that the interplay between the various centers of the brain play a part in the financial decisions that people make.

Development Marketplace for African Diaspora in Europe

The first Development Marketplace for the African Diaspora in Europe (D-MADE) ended in Brussels last week, awarding close to a million dollars for sixteen investment projects in Africa. The winning projects will be implemented in 11 African countries, including Mali (4), Cote d'Ivoire (2) Benin (2) and one each for Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

The winners were selected from a group of 68 finalists who presented projects that a 24-person jury deemed innovative, sustainable, replicable and based on sound business principles. The D-MADE initiative was launched in 2007 to allow entrepreneurs from the African Diaspora in Europe to participate in the development of their countries.

Fridays Academy: Gender and the Labor Market

As usual on Fridays, from Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Gender Inequality and the Labor Market