Performance and Equality in Public Sector Wages

Abstract

The present paper describes how democratic values—reflected by work equality values—paired with the organizational performance characteristics—defined by the height of organizational inputs and outputs—affect gender differences in wages. It is suggested here that despite the democratic conception of the public sector's equal employment opportunities, variations in the organizational performance of 83 local authorities account for gender differences in wages. The study assumes that organizational inputs (type and level of resources) and outputs (type and level of provided services) generate gender differences in individual earnings, when controlling for human capital factors. The results show that variations in organizational performance affect women's but not men's wages. However, the effect of individual level (demographic, human capital and employment) characteristics, reflecting the meritocracy‐based and democratic nature of public sector employment rather than the level of organizational performance explains most of the variance in gender differences in wages. These results point to the slow shift from the principle of administrative values of democracy and equality to the adoption of performance‐related mechanisms in the determination of public sector wages.     

Ethiopian female domestic labour migration to the Middle East: patterns,trends, and drivers

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the trends, patterns, and determinants of Ethiopian domestic labour migration to Arab countries. The primary motive behind migration is to move out of poverty and to improve family living standards through remittances. Migration to Arab countries has intensified due to social networks, expansion of illegal agencies, and the relative fall of migration costs. This movement is also the result of a shift in demand away from Asian domestic workers who tend to seek higher wages, to cheap labour source countries such as Ethiopia. This underlines not only the complexity of human mobility across national borders but also indicates the importance of conceptualising this movement in a broader global perspective, going beyond the traditional push-pull factors embedded in origin and destination countries. Female domestic migrants have received marginal attention from policy-makers and their vulnerability to various forms of abuse and exploitation has continued over the years.     

Labour and Its Discontents: The Consequences of Orthodox Reform in Venezuela and Mexico

The negative impacts of orthodox liberalisation policies on labour in Venezuela and Mexico were representative of outcomes elsewhere in Latin America. Untheorised increases in precarious informal work, unemployment, and emigration as well as a growing breech between wages and productivity followed trade, capital, and labour market reforms and the prescribed macro stabilisation policies. Orthodox reforms in both countries paradoxically facilitated market failures given the forms or modes taken by foreign direct investment (FDI), which introduced ever more increasing scale economies with their attendant information imperfections. In addition, the growing competition from tradeable goods faced by domestic producers in both countries and the decision to buy rather than make technologies by way of FDI undermined job creation and induced inter-sectoral flows toward service sector and informal work.     

Short-term Labour Migration from the Republic of Armenia to the Russian Federation

Abstract

We explore the determinants of short-term labour migration from Armenia to Russia based on a unique panel dataset. A dynamic switching regression model with endogenous switching is applied. Our evidence pinpoints migration experience, the expected individual income gap from migration, low job opportunities in Armenia and the possibility of diversifying income risks as the most important determinants. Family ties turn out to be insignificant. The hypothetical income gap is about 280 per cent. Several explanations are provided for the fact that some individuals do not migrate in spite of a large income gap.     

The Labour Market Impacts of Immigration to Developing Countries: Evidence from a Registration Campaign in Thailand

Little is known about the labour market impact of immigration to developing countries, because most immigration to developing countries is poorly measured. We use an unusual dataset from a campaign to register irregular migrants to study how immigration has affected wages, employment, and internal migration in Thailand. We allow for endogenous migration, whereby immigrants are disproportionately attracted to areas with higher wages. Our results suggest that immigration sufficient to increase Thailand's total labour force by one per cent would reduce Thai wages by approximately half a per cent. This effect is stronger than is generally found in developed countries. We find no evidence that immigration has reduced Thai employment rates or has affected internal migration by Thais.     

Behind an Offshore Mask: sovereignty games in the global political economy

This study of global financial flows and offshore financial centres (OFCs) draws on the concept of nomadology as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to argue that OFCs not only facilitate the circulation of global capital, but also serve to create the means for identity arbitrage. This concept highlights the use of the offshore in order to benefit from the variety of preferential measures offered to foreign firms and investment capital. State sovereignty authorises legislation by regimes to attract and regulate foreign investment. International banking statistics are examined for indications of the use of and impact from exploiting the offshore to establish a different national identity in pursuit of the greatest available return on investment. The paper concludes that the design of legislation by onshore states is just as complicit in the positive and negative effects of the offshore economy as are the small sovereign economies that host an OFC.     

Immigration in the Life Histories of Women Living in the United States-Mexico Border Region

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role that immigration plays in the lives of very low-income women living along the United States-Mexico border. Life here is distinct from that in any other part of the United States, due to the international, social, political, and economic interdependence that characterizes this region. Thus, from the perspective of migration as a social process, this “contact zone” can provide insight on migration issues that occur within a transborder context. Based on life history interviews and focus groups with women living in two adjoining border cities, Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, we observed the trajectories of women at two points of the migration course: (a) migration from the interior of Mexico to the northern border and (b) emigration across the international boundary to the United States. The study shows that although these women held expectations that migration would improve their lives and the lives of their families, their social and economic integration in the border region met with limited success.     

Determinants of Intraregional Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa 1980-2000

Abstract

Despite great accomplishments in the migration literature, the determinants of South-South migration remain poorly understood. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper formulates and tests an empirical model for intraregional migration in sub-Saharan Africa within an extended human capital framework, taking into account spatial interaction. Using bilateral panel data between 1980 and 2000, we find that intraregional migration on the subcontinent is predominantly driven by economic opportunities and sociopolitics in the host country, facilitated by geographical proximity. The role played by network effects and environmental conditions is also apparent. Finally, origin and destination spatial dependence should definitely not be ignored.     

When States Die: geographic and territorial pathways to state death

Abstract

State death, understood as the formal loss of control over foreign policy, is an important but neglected issue in the international relations literature. When do states die and why? How do states exit the system? The consequences of state death can be wide-ranging, from forced migration movements, regional instability, to general famine. Despite these severe consequences, political scientists have yet to adequately study the causes of state death. Fazal finds that states are prone to death when they are located as a buffer between two rivals; this suggests that being a buffer state is a cause of state death. Our expansion of current research seeks to add the concept of territorial disputes to the state death literature. We suggest that states are at greater risk of death when they become involved in territorial disputes that raise the stakes of conflict. The resulting research demonstrates that a reliable predictor of state death is engagement in a territorial dispute. Territorial disputes are the most prevalent issue that leads to war and can also be a leading cause of state death.     

Immigration to Ghana

Abstract

The globalization of international labor migration is manifest in all countries now engaging in migration systems that are growing in size and complexity and producing an increasing diversity of flows. Furthermore, many of the processes that create and drive these systems operate on a worldwide basis, the consequence of economic globalization, capital mobility and widespread realization by governments that human resources can be traded for profit like any other resource.

This paper looks at Ghana's immigration policy in the light of its economic situation. It characterizes Ghana's immigration policy as geared towards using immigration to attract critical foreign investment, transfer of technology and human resource capital/skills for socio-economic development. Running concurrently is the policy to prevent illegal immigration, transnational crime, economic exploitation, social corruption and human trafficking.

The paper concludes that when the economic situation of Ghana was buoyant in the 1960s it attracted many immigrants especially from neighboring West African countries, however when the country's economy saw a down turn, immigrants were used as a convenient scapegoat and many were expelled. The irony though is that while the current poor economic situation of Ghana has made Ghanaians to immigrate to other countries, the political stability of the country does attract other West Africans and non-Africans and it is affording the country the opportunity to streamline its immigration and citizenship laws.     

Educational human capital and levels of income: Evidence from states in India, 1965 – 92

Abstract

This paper examines the long-run (steady-state) relationship between levels of educational human capital and levels of income for the 15 major states of India between 1965 and 1992. The relationship is estimated using the Pooled Mean Groups (PMG) technique; which produces common long-run coefficients but allows heterogeneity of the short-run adjustment parameters. The results suggest that levels of educational human capital, proxied by high school enrollment rates, have a robust positive impact on steady-state levels of income. This is true for male and female education, and the regressions also suggest that states which have larger gender-gaps in education have lower steady-state incomes. The estimated relationship is robust to the inclusion of alternative measures, added controls, and variation in the degree of state coverage.     

An Analysis of Institutional and Political Factors Affecting State Capital Expenditure

Abstract

This article examines state government spending patterns for capital projects during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a function of some of the institutional arrangements and procedural characteristics of state legislatures. The analysis is informed by the literature on distributive policymaking, which argues that lawmakers seek to send targetable benefits, such as capital projects, to their constituencies in pursuit of personal electoral benefits. Using a pooled, cross‐sectional time‐series approach, the authors find that states with a large number of seats in the lower chambers of their legislatures devoted a somewhat smaller portion of their state budgets to capital projects than did states with smaller lower chambers, ceteris paribus. Contrary to some log‐rolling models, the number of appropriations bills employed by a legislature seems to discourage capital spending, as does membership turnover in the upper chamber. This indicates that the capital budgeting process is not nearly as dominated by the executive branch as is commonly believed.     

Persuasion and Predation: The Effects of U.S. Military Aid and International Development Aid on Civilian Killings

ABSTRACT

Powerful states frequently employ foreign aid to pursue international security objectives. Yet aid's effectiveness will be undermined if it exacerbates the effects of conflict on civilians within recipient states. This article investigates how international development aid and U.S. military aid influence recipient governments' incentives and ability to target civilians. U.S. military aid has a persuasion effect on state actors, which decreases a recipient state's incentives and necessity to target civilians. Development aid flows, however, trigger a predation effect in some environments, exacerbating civilian targeting. An analysis of aid flows in 135 countries on civilian killings between 1989–2011 provides support for both the persuasion and predation effects associated with aid.     

The political economy of Indian planning

Peruvian statistics were examined to see if construction remained labour‐intensive during 1955–67. Data on output, employment, capital, and materials consumption were either lacking or had defects that made a direct comparison of trends impossible. But conclusions could be drawn from relative price and wage trends. If materials and capital had not been substituted for labour, average construction costs would have risen substantially more than they did. Our estimate was that by 1967 they would have been 25 per cent higher.

Evidence from a sample of firms, however, suggested that adoption of labour‐saving techniques cannot be tied simply to changes in wages compared with other costs. All eleven innovations studied, it is true, were markedly labour‐saving; but the rate of adoption did not closely follow wage changes. Adoption came most often during those less tense years when builders were neither overstrained with orders nor lacking credit and clients. One must conclude that both rising wages and innovations can limit employment expansion in relatively poor countries.

Since both agriculture and manufacturing have been unable to absorb the growing labour force of poor countries, economists have turned their attention to other sectors for supplementary employment expansion. One of these is construction. The construction sector creates not only jobs but builds capital goods with a desirable low import content. In association with carefully structured financial institutions, it may even generate savings. How much employment a given expansion of construction will provide depends on the production functions of the sector: their slopes and their potential shifts. One must find the changes in labour productivity that go with likely changes in volume, capital accumulation, trends in material supplies, and alternate technologies.

All these questions will get imprecise answers without good statistics on output, labour, capital, and materials, both unit prices and volume. If output varies in composition and in the relative quality of components, problems of weighting and aggregating arise. Because of the sector's ? instability and footloose nature, data on construction remain inferior compared with other sectors even in the most advanced and statistics‐rich countries. Can one make anything of the sorts of data available in poor countries where the sector must play its most crucial role?

In this article, using rather limited data, we note with considerable alarm that steady labour intensity and corresponding employment expansion cannot be taken for granted. Where daily wages are but a fraction of hourly American wages, and where interest rates are a multiple of American rates, the more lavish use of materials and machinery compared with labour can nevertheless begin early.

Peru is the country selected for our study. During 1955–67 Peru had a relatively high national output growth rate of 5.6 per cent together with a moderate rate of inflation of about 9 per cent. Except for the devaluation years of 1958 and 1967, flourishing exports of fishmeal, copper, cotton, and sugar helped carry this rate of growth. Lima was one of the continent's fastest‐growing cities in population and building, particularly in squatter barriadas. But in the 1960s commercial conduction also grew at more than a 15 per cent compound rate, measured in square metres built, according to some estimates.1 During 1964–68, construction had high priority under President Fernando Belaunde, a professional architect. More U.S. foreign aid for housing (direct and guaranteed private loans) went to Peru in absolute terms during this period than to any other country. We shall analyse the consequences by examining (1) trends in relative costs, (2) relative output and import trends, and (3) data about receptivity to innovations in a sample of firms.     

Induced Wage Effects of Changes in Food Prices in Egypt

The trend in real agricultural wages in Egypt over the two decades since the mid-1970s is well described by an inverted U-shaped curve with a peak around 1985. But the rise and fall of real wages masks a complex dynamic process by which nominal wages adjust in response to changes in food prices. We use governorate-level panel data for 1976–93 to explore the nature of this adjustment process. Our results indicate that nominal wages adjust slowly. There is a significant negative initial impact of rising food prices on real wages, though wages do catch up in the long run.     

Between Russia and a Hard Place: Great Power Grievances and Central Asian Ambivalence

Abstract

This essay asks how Central Asian states have responded to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and salvos against the West, as a means to assess how Russia and the Central Asian states understand their national interests and exercise state power. It argues that the post-Soviet region shares a cynical and geopolitically driven view of the exercise of global power. Yet Russia has sometimes deployed its resources to advance short-term ideological objectives, whereas Central Asian foreign policy is pragmatic and opportunistic. The Ukraine crisis threatened to coerce the Central Asian states into conformity with Russia’s interests; ironically, their dependence on Russia has enabled their freedom of action in foreign policy, within limits. The essay highlights the ways that geography enables and constrains the execution of foreign policy, and considers the ambiguous role ideology plays in the formulation of national interests and the prospects for international cooperation.     

Reframing the rising powers debate: state transformation and foreign policy

Abstract

The volume that we introduce breaks with the prevalent tendency in International Relations (IR) scholarship to treat rising powers (such as China, Russia, India and Brazil) as unitary actors in international politics. Although a neat demarcation of the domestic and international domains, on which the notion of unitary agency is premised, has always been a myth, these states’ uneven integration into the global political economy has eroded this perspective’s empirical purchase considerably. Instead, this collection advances the concept of ‘state transformation’ as a useful lens through which to examine rising power states’ foreign policymaking and implementation. State transformation refers to the pluralisation of cross-border state agency via contested and uneven processes of fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of state apparatuses. The volume demonstrates the significance of state transformation processes for explaining some of these states’ most important foreign policy agendas, and outlines the implications for the wider field in IR.     

South Korea's State-led Soft Power Strategies: Limits on Inter-Korean Relations

Abstract

The South Korean government has taken on many of Joseph Nye's ideas as it is promoting a state-led soft power in the form of the cultural hallyu, foreign aid, and domestically, a future-orientated rebranding of South Korea as a multicultural state. Soft power is understood in instrumental terms as well as in more substantive terms. This state-led multiculturalism has challenged widely held beliefs in ethnic homogeneity which have been the mainspring of national identity and national security in South Korea. These beliefs have underscored inter-Korean relations as the two states officially share beliefs despite political and ideological differences. The growing significance of such state-led multiculturalism in Global Korea to attract foreign workers can be linked to a myriad of intentional and unintentional strategic issues arising from this form of state-led soft power promotion. This is particularly significant given the sensitive culture and identity across the East Asian region.     

Have Lower Real Wages Helped Industrial Restructuring in Romania?

A reduction in real wages arising from price liberalisation has been a standard feature of economies undergoing industrial restructuring. In this article, the impact of real wages on industrial performance is examined using a panel dataset of Romanian industries from 1990-96. Using both static and dynamic panel estimation, real wages are found not to be negatively associated with either output or employment. These results are consistent with a view that an institutionalist approach, aimed at improving productivity, may be more likely to achieve the long-term objective of successful industrial restructuring than standard adjustment programmes based on neo-classical theory.