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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Distance To Market And Sub-Saharan African Exports, Alberto Behar, Phil Manners
Distance To Market And Sub-Saharan African Exports, Alberto Behar, Phil Manners
Alberto Behar
A typical person in sub-Saharan Africa is a long way from world markets. Moreover, they are further from world markets now than they were in 1980 due to shifts in the location of world production. This partly reflects slower growth within Africa than for the world as a whole. Yet despite slower growth in Africa, African exports have become increasingly regionalized. By 2005, a country in sub-Saharan Africa typically exported twice as much to a country in their own region as would be expected based on economic size and bilateral distance. This regionalisation was not present in the early 1980s …
Would More Skills Raise Demand For Those Who Do Not Get Them? Evidence From South African Manufacturing, Alberto Behar
Would More Skills Raise Demand For Those Who Do Not Get Them? Evidence From South African Manufacturing, Alberto Behar
Alberto Behar
Policy makers claim a shortage of skills is constraining output and that a rise in skill supply would benefit less skilled occupations in South Africa. This assumes/implies skilled and unskilled labor are complements. To test the claim, this paper estimates Hicks Elasticities of Complementarity and elasticities of factor price with manufacturing data. Aggregate estimates suggest white collar labor complements blue collar labor, so a rise in skill supply would lead to a rise in demand for less skilled labor. Disaggregated results show skilled/artisanal and unskilled labor are complements while semi-skilled and unskilled labor are substitutes.
Would Cheaper Capital Replace Labour?, Alberto Behar
Would Cheaper Capital Replace Labour?, Alberto Behar
Alberto Behar
Left-leaning members of the ruling alliance should be careful what they wish for. By estimating elasticities of substitution and factor demand between capital and four labour types, we find micro-economic evidence that cheaper capital would reduce demand for labour. While capital and labour are substitutes, many but not all occupation types are themselves complements. These results allow for endogenous changes in output and apply to the vast majority of firms in our sample.
The Elasticity Of Substitution Between Skilled And Unskilled Labor In Developing Countries Is About 2, Alberto Behar
The Elasticity Of Substitution Between Skilled And Unskilled Labor In Developing Countries Is About 2, Alberto Behar
Alberto Behar
We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries. The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers. It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow us to produce overdue estimates for developing countries. With four types of data, elasticity estimates for developing countries are consistently about 2. In a skill-biased technical change framework, this estimate makes sense of what appears to be little or no correlation between relative skill supply and wage inequality.
Transport Costs And International Trade, Alberto Behar, Anthony J. Venables
Transport Costs And International Trade, Alberto Behar, Anthony J. Venables
Alberto Behar
The first issue we study is the impact of transport costs on the volume and nature of international trade. To what extent has the rise in international trade been driven by changes in transport costs? Why is cross-country and cross-regional experience so different? Transport costs also influence modal choice, the commodity composition of trade and the organisation of production, particularly as ‘just-in-time’ methods get extended to the global level. In turn, these new production methods are placing increasing demands on the transport system. The second issue is the determinants of international transport costs. There is enormous cross-country variation in transport …