Employment effects of output and technological progress in Malaysian manufacturing

A major factor contributing to the growth in industrial employment in Malaysia was the implementation of the export‐oriented industrialisation strategy. With the withdrawal of GSP privileges to the USA, the inevitable loss of comparative advantage in labour cost and the emergence of trading blocs, it is feared that the growth of the export‐oriented sectors in manufacturing will be impeded, causing a serious unemployment problem. This fear is compounded by the increasing shift to technology‐intensive methods of production which displace labour. This article shows that domestic demand and export expansion exert positive and almost equal influence on industrial employment. Any negative impact on employment due to a shortfall in exports could be neutralised if an appropriate choice of import‐substituting and export expansion policies is adopted. Displacement of labour due to the substitution effect of using technology‐ and capital‐intensive production is largely compensated for by the increase in labour utilisation due to the output effect of increased production for both the domestic and foreign markets.     

Aspects of local government and politics in china: 1955–58

This study, based on work in six villages, seeks insights into the likely effect of the introduction of prospective land‐, water‐, and crop‐management technologies, being researched at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi‐Arid Tropics, on the existing village labour‐use patterns in one major relevant region: peninsular India. Explicit attention is given to the similarities and differences between small and large farms and their relevance to the adoption of the prospective new technologies.

Regional variation in labour utilisation reveals a tremendous employment‐creating potential in the existing tank and well irrigation systems in the Alfisols of peninsular India. The prospective technologies should increase employment, compared with existing technologies, by at least 100 per cent in the Alfisols and by over 300per cent in the deep Vertisols— but with some increase in the seasonal variability of labour demand. Given the existing availability of labour, there will be, with the improved watershed technologies, major farm labour bottlenecks. These should eventually generate increased wage rates and employment potentials. However, even temporary adverse effects on the timelessness of operations could be critical to the success of a double‐cropping and/or intercropping technology aiming at greatly increased yields. This would create demands for selective mechanisation, for example, of threshing.     

Manpower planning and labour markets in developing countries: A case study of west Malaysia

In the past, aggregative studies and forecasts have dominated manpower planning in developing countries. Such exercises, however, tend to assume away or ignore a host of institutional factors that have far‐reaching influences on the determination of wages and employment and on the efficiency of labour markets. Consequently, this paper argues that disaggregated manpower research, focussed on current problems and conditions in employment markets, would be far more useful to economic development policies than the sort of abstract macro‐planning aimed at forecasts of long‐term manpower requirements which has been highly fashionable during the last decade.

The theme of the paper is substantiated with reference to the organization and workings of labour markets in West Malaysia. It is found that institutional and economic factors peculiar to that country have resulted in three ‘insulated’ labour markets, one each for Malays, Chinese and Indians, with practically no mobility of labour across insulated markets, even in widely divergent supply‐demand conditions. The final sections of the paper briefly examine the implications of insulated markets for manpower and economic policies.     

Green revolution and labour demand in rice farming: The case of central Luzon, 1966–90

While the adoption of modern rice varieties (MVs) increased labour requirements for crop care and other activities, it might have induced the adoption of labour‐saving technologies. Thus, whether the net impact of MV adoption on labour demand is significantly positive is still debated in the green revolution literature. Using farm‐level survey data collected in Central Luzon from 1966 to 1990, this study estimated simultaneously the labour‐saving technology adoption and the labour demand functions. We found, among other things, that MVs increased labour demand significantly without inducing the widespread adoption of labour‐saving technologies.     

Employment Effects of FDI in Mexico's Non-Maquiladora Manufacturing

This paper analyses whether foreign direct investment (FDI) has contributed to employment generation in Mexico's non-maquiladora manufacturing sector. Drawing on highly disaggregated FDI and employment data, we estimate dynamic labour demand functions for blue and white collar workers, including FDI as well as its interaction with major industry characteristics. FDI has a significantly positive, though quantitatively modest impact on manufacturing employment in Mexico. This applies to both white collar and blue collar employment. The employment enhancing effects of FDI are larger in export oriented industries. In more capital-intensive industries, the employment effect of FDI remains positive for blue collar workers but not white collar ones.     

Local initiatives for working women: Feminism,economics, or both?

This article examines a public/private sector initiative instigated by Leeds City Council to redress gender inequality in employment. It uses this independent initiative, Opp2k, to assess the business case for equality of opportunity in a ‘post‐feminist’ context. It considers whether or not intended outcomes will make a coherent attempt to redress structural inequality, or whether this is a response to demographic and economic trends indicating increased demand for female labour, finally it addresses the potential impact of public/private partnerships in implementing equal opportunities.     

Evidence on substitutability of adult and child labour

Whether child labour displaces adult labour, giving rise to unemployment, is a matter of their substitutability in production. Using a flexible form production function fitted to data on Egypt's economy, we generate Hicks elasticities of complementarity, own and cross‐price elasticities, as well as simulate employment effects on adult labour as a result of changing the fixed quantity of labour in compliance with the international call to end child labour. Adult males appear to be complementary with, and adult females substitutes for child labour, although the employment effects of banning child labour are inconclusive.     

Adjustment,stabilisation and the structure of employment in Brazil

A significant change in the structure of employment in Brazil in the period 1988–95 took place. Industrial employment fell, especially in the most traditional sectors such as clothing, textiles and footwear. There has been a shift of workers from the industrial sector to the services sector and an increase in the share of self‐employed workers and informal wage earners. The quality of jobs being created in the services sector are not of the same ‘quality’ as those in the industrial sector, leading to a deterioration of employment conditions and of the labour market performance. Hence the rate of unemployment is not a very good measure of labour market conditions during adjustment. The creation of jobs in general might therefore not be an explicit target under adjustment. Rather the objective should be trying to change labour market institutions in order to improve the quality of the jobs and the quality of the labour relations.     

North‐South trade and female labour in manufacturing: An asymmetry

A simple method of measuring the impact of North‐South trade on the female intensity of manufacturing is applied to data for developed and developing countries. The results confirm that growth of exports has increased the relative demand for female labour in the South. However, there does not appear to have been a general counterpart reduction in the relative demand for female labour in Northern manufacturing, even among blue‐collar workers. There are several possible reasons for the apparent conflict between these findings and other evidence that in Northern manufacturing females have been disproportionately displaced by trade with the South.     

Redistribution,consumer demand and employment in Kenyan furniture‐making

Earlier macro‐level studies of the secondary employment and income effects of an income redistribution ignored a key element in the income distribution‐technology‐employment hypothesis. No account was taken of the diversity of factor proportions within each industry, which is reflected in the size distribution of firms. This case study has been addressed at the level of a particular product group. From an expenditure survey the poor of Kenya are revealed to buy furniture predominantly from the smaller, more labour‐intensive firms in the industry. Consequently, a policy of income redistribution through growth will further the expansion of employment and earnings opportunities in the low income sector of the industry.     

Trade liberalisation in Brazil: Creating or exporting jobs?

Using the growth accounting and factor content approaches, this article looks at the impact of trade liberalisation on the structure and level of employment in Brazil over the 1990–97 period. The results support the argument that trade liberalisation in developing countries have a negative short‐term impact on employment — relatively small in Brazil's case ‐ which tends to be outweighed, in the long run, by a more labour‐intensive output mix.     

Local Navigations in a Global Industry: The Gendered Nature of Entrepreneurship in Ghana’s Oil and Gas Service Sector

Oil and gas discoveries spurred expectations of economic growth and employment in Ghana. The demand for labour is however limited within offshore petroleum extraction. Employment generation therefore depends on the development of an onshore oil and gas service sector. This study examines the strategies adopted by local entrepreneurs in the ‘oil city’ of Takoradi, focusing on the gendered nature of their activities, skills, networks and capital sources. I argue that the petroleum industry’s male dominance and international standards requirements, coupled with gender constraints regarding work and access to relevant resources, limit female entrepreneurs’ creation of employment in this emerging sector.     

WHY PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT SERVICES ALWAYS FAIL. DOUBLE‐SIDED ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION AND THE PLACEMENT OF LOW‐SKILL WORKERS IN SIX EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

It has been a general finding across Europe that very few job matches are facilitated by public employment services (PES).The article explains this failure by highlighting the existence of a double‐sided asymmetric information problem on the labour market. It is argued that although a PES potentially reduces search costs, both employers and employees have strong incentives not to use PES. The reason is that employers try to avoid the ‘worst’ employees, and employees try to avoid the ‘worst’ employers. Therefore these services get caught in a low‐end equilibrium that is almost impossible to escape. The mechanisms leading to this low‐end equilibrium are illustrated by means of qualitative interviews with 40 private employers in six European countries.     

The Invisibility of Wage Employment in Statistics on the Informal Economy in Africa: Causes and Consequences

Abstract

This article challenges the claim, along with the statistics that support it, that self-employment is by far the dominant employment status in the informal economy. The article begins by reviewing key insights from relevant literature on the informal economy to argue that conventional notions of ‘wage employment’ and ‘self-employment’, while unfit for capturing the nature and variety of employment relations in developing countries, remain central to the design of surveys on the workforce therein. After putting statistics on Tanzania’s informal economy and labour force into context, the analysis reviews the type of wage employment relationships that can be found in one instance of the informal economy in urban Tanzania. The categories and terms used by workers to describe their employment situation are then contrasted with those used by the latest labour force survey in Tanzania. The article scrutinises how key employment categories have been translated from English into Swahili, how the translation biases respondents’ answers towards the term ‘self-employment’, and how this, in turn, leads to the statistical invisibility of wage labour in the informal economy. The article also looks at the consequences of this ‘statistical tragedy’ and at the dangers of conflating varied forms of employment, including wage labour, that differ markedly in their modes of operation and growth potential. Attention is also paid to the trade-offs faced by policy-makers in designing better labour force surveys.     

Growth of agricultural output and labour absorption in India

The paper draws attention to the conceptual errors that arise out of the use of cross‐sectional data in the estimation of elasticity of person day employment with respect to output. It is argued that, since labour input varies significantly from crop to crop and for the same crop between different regions, it is necessary to bring this aspect explicitly into the analysis along with level of output. An alternative methodology is suggested and it is estimated that in India during the triennium ending 1970–71 to the triennium ending 1978–79 aggregate employment in crop husbandry increased by 21.02 per cent, which gives an employment elasticity with respect to total production of 0.76.     

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.     

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.     

Wage determination in Brazil: The growth of union bargaining power and informal employment

This article examines wage determination in Brazilian manufacturing during the 1980s and early 1990s. It presents evidence to show that the reduction in state regulation of collective bargaining has led to the development of a system of wage determination which is increasingly characterised by rent sharing and insider trade union bargaining power. Real wages appear increasingly inflexible with respect to movements in open unemployment, with a large informal sector disciplining formal sector wage bargaining and cushioning the impact of broader labour market conditions. An important consequence of this is that the employment costs of a successful counter‐inflationary strategy may be very severe.