You Can(’t) Always Get the Job You Want: Employment Preferences in the Peruvian Horticultural Export Chain

Abstract

Employment in high-value agro-export sectors has been recognised to entail the potential to contribute to poverty reduction in rural areas of developing countries. Concerns have yet been raised about the quality of the created employment and worker preferences have often been overlooked in the literature. We use a discrete choice experiment, in which we relate stated and revealed employment preference of agro-industry export workers in Peru. We explain employment (mis)matches as a function of personal and employer characteristics. Results suggest that employment preferences are heterogeneous, but that some groups of workers are systematically less likely to meet their ideal employment expectations. We formulate policy recommendations for both agro-industry employers to increase their workers’ job satisfaction, and for development agencies concerned with employment quality in high-value export sectors.