Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

The Employment Problem In South Africa, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

South Africa is experiencing a major employment problem that includes not only unemployment, but also low labour market earnings. In this article, Gary Fields discusses what can be done to alleviate South Africa's employment problem.

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International Labor Standards And Decent Work: Perspectives From The Developing World, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] It is a very positive development that the world community has now reached agreement on four core labor standards, described further below. The moral force of this agreement will help slow and possibly even reverse the infamous "race to the bottom"—for example, child labor in the carpet industries of India undermining Nepal's efforts to keep its carpet industry free of child labor (Hensman, 2000). Ironically, some of the loudest and most strident voices against international labor standards come from the poorest parts of the world. My thesis in this chapter is that while some of the arguments being voiced …

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Does Income Mobility Equalize Longer-Term Incomes? New Measures Of An Old Concept, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper develops a new class of measures of mobility as an equalizer of longer-term incomes – a concept different from other notions such as mobility as time-independence, positional movement, share movement, income flux, and directional income movement. A number of properties are specified leading to a class of indices, one easily-implementable member of which is applied to data for the United States and France. Using this index, income mobility is found to have equalized longer-term earnings among U.S. men in the 1970s but not in the 1980s or 1990s. In France, though, income mobility was equalizing throughout, and it …

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Labor Market Analysis For Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper is about analyzing labor markets in developing countries, searching for both improved understanding and greater policy relevance. Following a five-part policy evaluation framework, the highlights of labor markets in developing countries are presented. Theoretical models with multiple sectors and segments and empirical analysis using different kinds of data are then reviewed. A brief concluding section addresses some priority research needs.

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Reflections On My Immersion In India, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Kalavati’s family derives all of its money from labor earnings. Her husband long ago worked for the Cannon textile mills when they were still making bath towels in India. Sixteen years earlier, the mill shut down, moving to a place where labor was even cheaper, and her husband lost his job. For fifteen years, he did not work. Then finally, he got a job where he works at night. He does not tell Kalavati where he works or how much he earns, nor does he contribute his earnings to the day-to-day expenses. (He does contribute to interest payments to …

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Poverty Effects Of The Minimum Wage: The Role Of Household Employment Composition, Gary S. Fields, Baran Han, Ravi Kanbur

Gary S Fields

A change in a country’s minimum wage will in general affect the number of workers in covered sector employment, uncovered sector employment, and unemployment. The impact of these labor market adjustments on absolute poverty will depend on how the pattern of employment composition changes within households and on how income is shared within households. An earlier paper (Fields and Kanbur, 2007) focused on the income-sharing dimension of the problem. The present paper focuses on household employment composition. For a particular structure of the labor market— one with good jobs, bad jobs, unemployment, and adult and youth workers— and with a …

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What We Know (And Want To Know) About Earnings Mobility In Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Some developing countries have experienced rapid economic growth, some slow economic growth, some no growth at all, and some economic decline. The traditional way of gauging the distributional consequences of economic growth, if in fact there was economic growth, is to use data from comparable cross sections to calculate various measures of (relative) inequality and (absolute) poverty. The very large literature on inequality and poverty will not be reviewed here. A newer approach in the development literature is to study the distributional consequences of economic growth (or non-growth) by using data for the same recipient units for two or …

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Poverty And Low Earnings In The Developing World, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

More than three billion people are poor by international standards, and essentially all are to be found in the low- and middle-income countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The issues for understanding poverty in the developing world - among them, self-employment and household enterprises, agricultural work, casual employment, and informal work – differ from those in the developed world. Different policy issues predominate: stimulating economic growth, harnessing the energies of the private sector, increasing paid employment, and raising the returns to self-employment. This chapter details how the poorer half of the world’s people work and gives an overview of …

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Should Poverty And Inequality Measures Be Combined?, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] As the title of my paper indicates, the purpose of today's presentation is to analyze whether poverty and inequality measures should be blended into a single index. This question was first raised to me by Erik, so it is very fitting that an answer be presented at a conference honoring his distinguished career.

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A Welfare Economic Analysis Of Labor Market Policies In The Harris-Todaro Model, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper presents a welfare economic analysis of the benefits of various labor market policies in the Harris-Todaro labor market model. The policies considered are a policy of modern sector job creation, which I call modern sector enlargement (MSENL); a policy of rural development, which I call traditional sector enrichment (TSENR); and a policy of wage limitation in the urban economy, which I call modern sector wage restraint (MSWR). First, I analyze the inequality effects of these policies. I then perform two welfare economic analyses, the first based on summary measures of labor market conditions (total labor earnings, unemployment, inequality …

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How Demanding Should Equality Of Opportunity Be, And How Much Have We Achieved?, Valentino Dardanoni, Gary S. Fields, John E. Roemer, Maria Laura Sánchez Puerta

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] This chapter proposes tests of various notions of equality of opportunity and applies them to intergenerational income data for the United States and Britain. Agreement is widespread that equality of opportunity holds in a society if the chances that individuals have to succeed depend only on their own efforts and not on extraneous circumstances that may inhibit or expand those chances. What is contentious, however, is what constitutes "effort" and "circumstances." Most people, we think, would say that the social connections of an individual's parents would be included among circumstances: equality of opportunity is incomplete if some individuals get …

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Modeling Labor Market Policy In Developing Countries: A Selective Review Of The Literature And Needs For The Future, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Sound labor market policy requires sound labor market models. Sound models have three characteristics. First, from a welfare economic point of view, the policy judgments are explicit, mutually consistent, and thoroughly worked out. Second, from a theoretical point of view, the models are sufficiently detailed and suitably rigorous. And third, from an empirical point of view, the models guide and are guided by solid quantitative evidence. This paper reviews models of labor markets in developing countries from both a positive and a normative point of view. The survey is selective in that it exposits only some of the more …

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A Public Lecture: Labour Markets And Economic Development, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] I want to put forward three propositions to you based on decades of work in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. First, economic development can be (but need not be) a win-win-win situation - for businesses, for individuals and groups of individuals, and for governments and non- governmental organisations (NGOs). Second, the labour market can (but need not) serve as an effective mechanism for contributing to economic growth and for transmitting the gains from economic growth. And third, in both of these areas, whether a country experiences the more favorable set of outcomes or the less favorable ones reflects a) …

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Dualism In The Labor Market: A Perspective On The Lewis Model After Half A Century, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper asks how the Lewis model might be viewed from the perspective of economic science half a century later. Many of the core propositions remain intact, some might be amplified, and a small number might be revised.

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Household Income Dynamics: A Four Country Story, Gary S. Fields, Paul L. Cichello, Samuel Freije, Marta Menéndez, David Newhouse

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] In this paper, we analyse the dynamics of household per capita incomes using longitudinal data from Indonesia, South Africa, Spain and Venezuela. We find that in all four countries reported initial income and job changes of the head are consistently the most important variables in accounting for income changes, overall and for initially poor households. We also find that changes in income are more important than changes in household size and that changes in labour earnings are more important than changes in other sources of household income.

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The Microeconomics Of Changing Income Distribution In Malaysia, Gary S. Fields, Sergei Soares

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] This study uses data from Malaysia's Household Income and Expenditure Surveys to quantify the importance of different factors in accounting for the changes in Malaysia's income distribution between 1984 and 1989 ("Period 1") and between 1989 and 1997 ("Period 2"). These particular years were chosen, because 1997 is the most recent available survey, 1984 is the earliest survey comparable to 1997, and 1989 is important for three reasons: 1. Income inequality fell until 1989 and rose thereafter. 2. Economic growth was slow in 1984-89 and fast in 1989-97. and 3. 1989 is the closest year to the beginning of …

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Decent Work And Development Policies, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Welcoming the shift to outcomes which he perceives in the ILO's focus on decent work, the author explores the major issues thus raised. He discusses how to make the notion of decent work more precise in operational terms, and how to develop an integrated approach to economic and social policy in the decent work context, before formulating an empirical approach to assessing the effects of economic growth on decent work. Finally, he outlines a structure for the ILO's planned country reviews of progress towards decent work.

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Earnings And Employment Dynamics For Africans In Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Panel Study Of Kwazulu-Natal, Paul L. Cichello, Gary S. Fields, Murray Leibbrandt

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] The labour market is central in determining individual and household well-being in South Africa. Therefore, an understanding of earnings and employment dynamics is a key policy issue. However, the absence of panel data has constrained empirical work addressing these issues. This paper makes use of a regional panel data set for KwaZulu-Natal to begin the study of earnings and employment dynamics. The authors find that, on average, working-aged Africans in KwaZulu-Natal experienced large gains in earnings during the period 1993–8. These gains were progressive in nature, with the highest quintile of 1993 earners and those originally employed in the …

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Employment In Low-Income Countries: Beyond Labor Market Segmentation?, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

No abstract provided.

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U.S. Earnings Mobility: Comparing Survey-Based And Administrative-Based Estimates, Lisa M. Dragoset, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Earnings mobility has been studied both at the macro level (how much of a certain kind of mobility is there in the economy?) and at the micro level (what are the correlates of change in income or position?). Many empirical mobility studies provide estimates of the amount of mobility in a country over time and the correlates of individual mobility within the income distribution. While measurement error is recognized as potentially important at both these levels, very little is known about the degree to which earnings mobility estimates are affected by measurement error. In this paper, we use a new …

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Waging The War For Talent: Do Recruitment And Screening Strategies Raise Employee Performance?, Jed Devaro, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

We use data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to provide an empirical answer to the question, “Do recruitment and screening strategies raise employee performance?” Our approach differs from previous empirical work in that we allow for changes in screening behavior to accompany changes in recruitment behavior. In the end, our results are consistent with those of the previous literature that ignores the auxiliary effect of recruitment through screening, in that we find no effect of recruitment methods on worker performance.

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Income Mobility In Latin America, Gary S. Fields, Robert Duval Hernández, Samuel Freije Rodríguez, María Laura Sánchez Puerta

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] In the last decades Latin American countries have experienced substantial macroeconomic instability. While the region as a whole experienced economic growth during most of the 1990’s and 2000’s, there were also years of stagnation as well as economic decline.

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Labor Market, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] According to textbooks such as Ronald Ehrenberg and Robert Smith’s "Modern Labor Economics" (2005), a "labor market" is the place where labor services are bought and sold. The term "labor" is equated to the term "work", not only manual work but also knowledge work. Sometimes, the place where labor services are bought and sold is a clearly identifiable one such as a construction site or a lawyer’s office. Other times, the place is ill-defined, as for the work of most readers of this article, who are hired in one location and who perform labor services in a number of …

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Labor Retrenchment Laws And Their Effect On Wages And Employment: A Theoretical Investigation, Kaushik Basu, Gary S. Fields, Shub Debgupta

Gary S Fields

No abstract provided.

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Doing The Right Jobs Right: Managers’ Attributes And Activities At Borders, Gary S. Fields, Jed Devaro

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] This article starts with a simple value proposition: that companies can save large sums and gain competitive advantage by utilizing more fully their own data on the determinants of profit. In this article, we describe how we used a variety of statistical methods (correlations, simple regressions, multiple regressions, and decompositions) to help one company, Borders, gain competitive advantage by learning from itself.

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Earnings Mobility In Argentina, Mexico, And Venezuela: Testing The Divergence Of Earnings And The Symmetry Of Mobility Hypotheses, Gary S. Fields, Robert Duval Hernández, Samuel Freije Rodríguez, María Laura Sánchez Puerta

Gary S Fields

This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask whether those individuals who start in the best economic position are those who experience the largest earnings gains or the smallest earnings losses; this is the “divergent mobility” hypothesis. We also compare periods of positive economic growth with those of negative economic growth, asking whether those groups of individuals that experience large positive earnings gains when the economy is growing are the same as those that experience large earnings losses when the economy is contracting; this …

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How Much Should We Care About Changing Income Inequality In The Course Of Economic Growth?, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper asks how much we should care about changes in Lorenz curves and standard inequality measures when economic growth takes place. I conclude that these changes are of some importance but that other aspects of inequality and poverty are more important.

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Leading For The Bottom Line: A View Of Leadership In A Bottom-Line Context, Gary S. Fields , Cory Stern

Gary S Fields

This paper sets out to establish and describe a new approach to leadership called Bottom Line Leadership. The essence of Bottom Line Leadership is that a leader’s most critical responsibility is to clearly identify, communicate and gain buy-in for the ultimate bottom-line objective of the organization he/she leads, subject to constraints imposed by the market and by the organization itself. In comparison to other leadership models that focus on the general attributes or behaviors characterizing effective leaders, Bottom Line Leadership emphasizes the link between an organization’s purpose and a leader’s behavior. The philosophy that serves as the foundation for this …

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Dual Economy, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Dual economy models arose as a reaction against single sector models. A half-century ago, theoretical modeling of economic growth was dominated by single sector models such as that of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow. Other analysts, though, felt that economies would better be characterized as having multiple sectors, which they stylized into dual economy models. Foremost among the early dual economy modelers were two other Nobel Prize winners, W. Arthur Lewis and Simon Kuznets. The dual economy models posited a relatively advanced sector and a relatively backward sector. These have alternatively been called capitalist and subsistence, formal and informal, …

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Employment Problem In South Africa, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

International Labor Standards And Decent Work: Perspectives From The Developing World, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Does Income Mobility Equalize Longer-Term Incomes? New Measures Of An Old Concept, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Labor Market Analysis For Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Reflections On My Immersion In India, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Poverty Effects Of The Minimum Wage: The Role Of Household Employment Composition, Gary S. Fields, Baran Han, Ravi Kanbur

Gary S Fields

What We Know (And Want To Know) About Earnings Mobility In Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Poverty And Low Earnings In The Developing World, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Should Poverty And Inequality Measures Be Combined?, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

A Welfare Economic Analysis Of Labor Market Policies In The Harris-Todaro Model, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

How Demanding Should Equality Of Opportunity Be, And How Much Have We Achieved?, Valentino Dardanoni, Gary S. Fields, John E. Roemer, Maria Laura Sánchez Puerta

Gary S Fields

Modeling Labor Market Policy In Developing Countries: A Selective Review Of The Literature And Needs For The Future, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

A Public Lecture: Labour Markets And Economic Development, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Dualism In The Labor Market: A Perspective On The Lewis Model After Half A Century, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Household Income Dynamics: A Four Country Story, Gary S. Fields, Paul L. Cichello, Samuel Freije, Marta Menéndez, David Newhouse

Gary S Fields

The Microeconomics Of Changing Income Distribution In Malaysia, Gary S. Fields, Sergei Soares

Gary S Fields

Decent Work And Development Policies, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Earnings And Employment Dynamics For Africans In Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Panel Study Of Kwazulu-Natal, Paul L. Cichello, Gary S. Fields, Murray Leibbrandt

Gary S Fields

Employment In Low-Income Countries: Beyond Labor Market Segmentation?, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

U.S. Earnings Mobility: Comparing Survey-Based And Administrative-Based Estimates, Lisa M. Dragoset, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Waging The War For Talent: Do Recruitment And Screening Strategies Raise Employee Performance?, Jed Devaro, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Income Mobility In Latin America, Gary S. Fields, Robert Duval Hernández, Samuel Freije Rodríguez, María Laura Sánchez Puerta

Gary S Fields

Labor Market, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Labor Retrenchment Laws And Their Effect On Wages And Employment: A Theoretical Investigation, Kaushik Basu, Gary S. Fields, Shub Debgupta

Gary S Fields

Doing The Right Jobs Right: Managers’ Attributes And Activities At Borders, Gary S. Fields, Jed Devaro

Gary S Fields

Earnings Mobility In Argentina, Mexico, And Venezuela: Testing The Divergence Of Earnings And The Symmetry Of Mobility Hypotheses, Gary S. Fields, Robert Duval Hernández, Samuel Freije Rodríguez, María Laura Sánchez Puerta

Gary S Fields

How Much Should We Care About Changing Income Inequality In The Course Of Economic Growth?, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Leading For The Bottom Line: A View Of Leadership In A Bottom-Line Context, Gary S. Fields , Cory Stern

Gary S Fields

Dual Economy, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields