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21. The COVID-19 Pandemic in Latin American and Caribbean countries: The Labor Supply Impact by Gender

Author:
Mariana Viollaz, Mauricio Salazar-Saenz, Luca Flabbi, Monserrat Bustelo, and Mariano Bosch
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
We study the labor supply impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by gender in four Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries: Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, and Mexico. To identify the impact, we compare labor market stocks and labor market flows over four quarters for a set of balanced panel samples of comparable workers before and after the pandemic. We find that the pandemic has negatively affected the labor market status of both men and women, but that the effect is significantly stronger for women, magnifying the already large gender gaps that characterize LAC countries. The main channel through which this stronger impact is taking place is the increase in child care work affecting women with school-age children.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Markets, Labor Issues, Inequality, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Latin America and Caribbean

22. Organizational Hierarchies and Export Destinations

Author:
Irene Brambilla, Andres Cesar, Guillermo Falcone, and Guido Porto
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
This paper proposes a new link relating export destinations and the organization of the firm. We claim that the production of higher-quality varieties exported to rich destinations induces firms to re-structure their production processes, becoming organizationally more complex. We introduce a theoretical model with these features and we explore the mechanisms using a panel of Chilean manufacturing plants. Our identification strategy relies on falling tariffs on Chilean products across destinations caused by the signature of Free Trade Agreements with high-income countries (the European Union, the United States, and South Korea). We find that Chilean plants that were induced by these tariff reductions to start exporting to high-income destinations increased the number of hierarchical layers and upgraded the quality of their products. This involved the addition of qualified supervisors that facilitated the provision of higher product quality. These effects took place at new high-income exporting firms.
Topic:
Economy, Free Trade, Exports, Hierarchy, and Quality
Political Geography:
Latin America and Chile

23. The Risk of Automation in Latin America

Author:
Irene Brambilla, Andrés César, Guillermo Falcone, Leonardo Gasparini, and Carlo Lombardo
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
In this paper we characterize workers’ vulnerability to automation in the near future in the six largest Latin American economies as a function of the exposure to routinization of the tasks that they perform and the potential automation of their occupation. We combine (i) indicators of potential automatability by occupation and (ii) worker’s information on occupation and other labor variables. We find that the ongoing process of automation is likely to significantly affect the structure of employment. In particular, unskilled and semi-skilled workers are likely to bear a disproportionate share of the adjustment costs. Automation will probably be a more dangerous threat for equality than for overall employment.
Topic:
Employment, Income Inequality, Economy, and Automation
Political Geography:
Latin America

24. Poverty in Latin America

Author:
Leonardo Gasparini, María Emma Santos, and Leopoldo Tornarolli
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
Despite some progress in recent decades, poverty remains a top social concern in Latin America. A large proportion of Latin Americans live with very low incomes and are deprived in other fundamental welfare dimensions such as education, health, housing and sanitation. The measurement of income and multidimensional poverty in the region has advanced significantly in recent decades. In particular, there has been a remarkable increase in the availability of microdata from national household surveys and of poverty statistics published by governments and other institutions. Yet, the measurement of poverty in Latin America still has some limitations that should be addressed in the years to come. This chapter discusses the measurement of monetary and multidimensional poverty in Latin America, and documents the main patterns and trends. By providing an updated assessment of the level, changes and characteristics of poverty in the region we expect to contribute to the more ambitious debate on its determinants and policy implications. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2 we describe the data sources and main methodological issues regarding the measurement of income poverty, while in Section 3 we document the main patterns and trends over the recent decades. We repeat the sequence for the measurement of multidimensional poverty: Section 4 for methodological issues and Section 5 for evidence. The paper concludes in Section 6 with some brief concluding remarks.
Topic:
Poverty, Income Inequality, Economy, and Sanitation
Political Geography:
Latin America

25. Social Mobility and Economic Development: Evidence from a Panel of Latin American Regions

Author:
Guido Neidhofer, Matias Ciaschi, Leonardo Gasparini, and Joaquín Serrano
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
We explore the role of social mobility as a driver of economic development by constructing a panel data set that includes measures of intergenerational mobility of education at the sub-national level in Latin America. First, we map the geography of educational mobility for 52 Latin American regions, as well as its evolution over time. Then, through a novel weighting procedure that considers the participation of cohorts to the economy in each year, we estimate the effect of changes in mobility on economic indicators, such as income per capita, poverty, child mortality, and luminosity. Hereby, we control for several covariates, including migration, educational expansions, initial conditions, and unobserved cross-regional heterogeneity. Our findings show that increasing social mobility had a significant and robust impact on the development of Latin American regions.
Topic:
Development, Economic Growth, Economic Mobility, Equality, and Equality of Opportunity
Political Geography:
Latin America

26. Routinization and Employment: Evidence for Latin America

Author:
Leonardo Gasparini, Irene Brambilla, Guillermo Falcone, Carlo Lombardo, and Andres Cesar
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
We study changes in employment by occupations characterized by different degree of exposure to routinization in the six largest Latin American economies over the last two decades. We combine our own indicators of routine task content based on information from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIACC) with labor market microdata from harmonized national household surveys. We find that the increase in jobs was decreasing in the automatability of the tasks typically performed in each occupation, and increasing in the initial wage, a pattern more consistent with the traditional skill-biased technological change than with the polarization hypothesis.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Employment, Automation, and Job Creation
Political Geography:
South America, Latin America, and North America

27. Latin American Brotherhood? Immigration and Preferences for Redistribution

Author:
Julian Martinez-Correa, Leonardo Peñaloza Pacheco, and Leonardo Gasparini
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
The effect of immigration on preferences for redistribution has been recently studied in the context of developed countries receiving migrants from poorer coun- tries with very different cultural backgrounds. In this paper we explore this issue in the context of migration across similar Latin American countries. To this aim, we exploit data at the provincial level from a large attitudinal survey (LAPOP) and match it to immigration data from different sources. We follow three approaches: first, we implement an instrumental variables approach in a cross-section of cen- suses; second we estimate fixed effects models with data from a large sample of harmonized national household surveys, and third we exploit the massive inflow of Venezuelan refugees into the border country of Colombia with an instrumental vari- ables methodology. Our results suggest a significant, negative and non-monotonic relationship between the share of immigrants at the provincial level and the sup- port for redistribution policies. This anti-redistribution effect is larger among those individuals with higher income.
Topic:
Migration, Immigration, Refugees, Inequality, and Redistribution
Political Geography:
Latin America

28. Construction of an Extended Environmental and Economic Social Accounting Matrix from a Practitioner’s Perspective

Author:
Onil Banerjee, Martin Cicowiez, Renato Vargas, and Mark Horridge
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
In 2014, the United Nations published the first International Standard for environmental economic statistics, known as the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA).. As more countries adopt and implement the SEEA, the availability of consistent environmental and economic information increases the need for analytical tools that can use this data to respond to policy relevant questions. In this paper, we present a workflow to develop an environmentally extended social accounting matrix, which can serve as the basic database for the development of environmentally-extended computable general equilibrium models. To illustrate, and given its comprehensive implementation of the SEEA, we apply this workflow to the Guatemalan case and the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling (IEEM) Platform.
Topic:
Economics, United Nations, Basic Data, Accountability, Economic Policy, and Statistics
Political Geography:
South America, Latin America, Central America, Guatemala, and Global Focus

29. Living with the Neighbors: The Effect of Venezuelan Forced Migration on Wages in Colombia

Author:
Leonardo Peñaloza Pacheco
Publication Date:
07-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to estimate the causal effect of the migration of Venezuelans to Colombia on the Colombian real wage, since 2016. In the second semester of 2016, the borders between Colombia and Venezuela were reopened after a year of being closed due to a political crisis between the two countries; this re-opening is exploited as an identification strategy. Using data from the Unidad Administrativa Especial de Migraci´on Colombia and the Registro Administrativo de Migrantes Venezolanos in Colombia, it is estimated that the migratory flow of Venezuelans to Colombia increased the Economically Active Population of the border areas of La Guajira and Norte de Santander by approximately 10% and 15%, since its reopening. Differences-in-differences methodology and Synthetic Control Method are implemented and the results show that the increase in labor supply in these regions that resulted from the migratory flow generated a decline in real hourly wages of approximately 6%-9% on average. This decrease in real wages appears to be greater for men as compared to women. There is also evidence of a greater drop in real wages among people with lower levels of qualification and in conditions of informal employment.
Topic:
Economics, Migration, Political Economy, Labor Issues, Employment, and Income Inequality
Political Geography:
Colombia, Latin America, and Venezuela

30. Gender Gaps in Labor Informality: The Motherhood Effect

Author:
Mariana Marchionni, María Edo, Dolores de la Mata, Lucila Berniell, and Inés Berniell
Publication Date:
06-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
Recent work has quantified the large negative effects of motherhood on female labor market outcomes in Europe and the US. But these results may not apply to developing countries, where labor markets work differently and informality is widespread. In less developed countries, informal jobs, which typically include microenterprises and self-employment, offer more time flexibility but poorer social protection and lower labor earnings. These characteristics affect the availability of key inputs in the technology to raise children, and therefore may affect the interplay between parenthood and labor market outcomes. Through an event-study approach we estimate short and long-run labor market impacts of children in Chile, an OECD developing country with a relatively large informal sector. We find that the birth of the first child has strong and long lasting effects on labor market outcomes of Chilean mothers, while fathers remain unaffected. Becoming a mother implies a sharp decline in mothers’ labor supply, both in the extensive and intensive margins, and in hourly wages. We also show that motherhood affects the occupational structure of employed mothers, as the share of jobs in the informal sector increases remarkably. In order to quantify what the motherhood effect would have been in the absence of an informal labor market, we build a quantitative model economy, that includes an informal sector which offers more flexible working hours at the expense of lower wages and weaker social protection, and a technology to produce child quality that combines time, material resources and the quality of social protection services. We perform a counterfactual experiment that indicates that the existence of the informal sector in Chile helps to reduce the drop in LFP after motherhood in about 35%. We conclude that mothers find in the informal sector the flexibility to cope with both family and labor responsibilities, although at the cost of resigning contributory social protection and reducing their labor market prospects.
Topic:
Economics, Gender Issues, Political Economy, and Women
Political Geography:
Latin America and Chile