Low-skilled Sectors Research Articles

Recidivism, Labor Markets, and Prison Conditions: Evidence from Uruguay

What explains prison recidivism? Relying on previously unavailable data on prison inmates in Uruguay, we study how external factors, such as employment dynamics on labor-intensive low-skilled jobs, and internal, such as prison-related factors, affect recidivism. Whereas the literature on recidivism has mostly focused on developed countries, we bring its study to the developing world and find that greater employment opportunities in labor-intensive, low-skill sectors, such as construction and domestic services, reduce recidivism. Consistent with the logic of economic opportunities, we also find heterogeneous effects by type of crime (property vs non-property). Finally, we find that prison-specific factors are also relevant, pointing to the importance of understanding prisons as part of the illegal ecosystem and the crime repression system. This analysis is novel to Latin America, a region besieged by the growing influence of criminal organizations that usually extend their influence and power to prisons.

Empowering the disadvantaged: a perspective on Saudi Arabia’s low-skilled female workers

ABSTRACT For a Saudi woman living in times of rapid socioeconomic transformation, working in a low-paid job may feel both obligatory and shameful. This paper argues that Saudi women – torn between traditionalism and modernity – are deeply impacted, though in ambivalent ways, by the recent empowerment discourse. It examines how the corporate world adopts the empowerment narrative to promote progress, modernity, and openness at the expense of women’s needs, preferences, and values. Through interviews with a diverse cohort of 20 employed women aged 20–45 years, this study seeks to unravel the motivations that drive women to pursue work in a patriarchal society where the conventional role of men entails assuming financial responsibility for women. Through an exploration of the motivations underlying women’s decisions to work – a few of which are the desire for recognition, financial independence, and self-worth – this paper investigates issues of visibility, space, and social responsibility. These key issues emphasize the struggles encountered by working women in attaining empowerment, autonomy, and self-worth despite their participation in the labour market and their financial independence. By examining low-skilled sectors in which women struggle with challenging working conditions, this paper aims to give voice to disadvantaged women who, in the empowerment plans, are left unheard and their future obscured.

Indonesian Government Policy Regarding Working Hours for Indonesian Female Migrant Workers Abroad in the COVID-19 Pandemic Era

Indonesia has been sending migrant workers since the 1970s and it is mostly dominated by women who work in the informal and low-skilled sectors such as domestic workers, child and elderly caretakers, or factory workers. The economic issue has become the biggest driving factor for these workers to work abroad, in addition to social and cultural factors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant women experienced significant impacts, especially changes to increasingly longer working hours. This research aims to identify COVID-19 on Indonesian female migrant workers and produce policy recommendations that protect women's work rights. This research design is qualitative research with data collection methods through literature study and in-depth interviews with Indonesian female migrant workers abroad. Based on research results, during the pandemic many Indonesian migrant workers worked longer than the applicable standard working hours, approximately more than 15 hours per day. However, there are no clear rules or forms of protection that guarantee the welfare of Indonesian migrant workers by increasing working hours beyond the established standards.

Midlife in a Changing and Post-Pandemic World. Implications for Career Education and Older Adult Learning Using On-Line and in Person Solutions

Abstract The present study addresses processes and tools for adult career guidance in the context of longer lives. The need for people in midlife to prepare for their remaining working lives is more urgent since the global pandemic, making demands on career and adult educators. Older workers and job-seekers, especially those with lower levels of prior education, face difficulties if employers discriminate against them or discount their skills and abilities, especially in low skilled sectors. An Erasmus Plus project’s results are discussed, demonstrating the benefits of online approaches to support employability, highlighting whether older workers could gain from using online and peer supported tools.

Rational Choice Theory and Taste of Japanese Popular Culture in Motivation of PMI to Enter Japan's Global Labor Market

<em>Developed countries as the axis of world industrialization attract developing countries with young demographic conditions to participate in the global labor market. According to the ILO's World Employment and Social Outlook-Trends 2019, the participation of the youth workforce has decreased. Besides being faced with an aging population, Japan also has a shortage of workers in the middle and low-skilled sectors. Meanwhile, Indonesia has the potential to experience a demographic bonus. The TITP / Kenshusei scheme is a realization of the labor demand and supply relationship. Rational Choice Theory by Coleman focuses on the rational actions of individuals in making decisions to achieve goals, with the calculation of benefits. According to Sonja Haug, indicators of capital and cultural capital influence the decision-making of migrant workers to migrate. In Futaba, workers from developing countries in Japan describe a relationship of mutual need. The state rationally forms a labor mobility policy in the era of the global labor market. Futaba then found that most participants drive-by economic needs and limited employment opportunities in their home countries. Based on the three indicators, career orientation and financial adequacy are the main factors besides the popularity of Japanese culture. Institutionally, the role of the family is the motivation for migration to meet financial needs at the beginning of a career. There is a process of adopting a lifestyle to the way of interaction and cultural habits of Japanese society. Herewith Japanese popular culture such as; the film, anime, manga, and game industries have contributed to the motivation of migrant workers to Japan.</em>

Commodity exports and educational inequality

ABSTRACT This paper studies the impact of commodity exports on educational inequality. Using data from 33 Latin America and the Caribbean countries over the period 1965 to 2010, the empirical analysis shows that export expansion of commodities leads to higher levels of educational inequality. The results are shown to be robust to the consideration of many control variables, different measures of commodity exports, and endogeneity of export expansion in commodities. Given the importance of educational inequality for economic growth, our results suggest a potential role for policy intervention in balancing the trade-off between promoting the aggregation production of education and increasing export growth in low-skill sectors.

Migrant workers in precarious employment

PurposeVarious forms of precarious employment create barriers to the integration and inclusion of migrant workers in receiving countries. The purpose of this paper is to review extant research in employment relations and management to identify key factors that contribute to migrant workers' precarious employment and highlight potential avenues for future research.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a narrative literature review drawing on 38 academic journal articles published between 2005 and 2020.FindingsThe authors’ review suggests that macro- and meso-level factors contribute to the precarious employment conditions of migrant workers. However, there is a limited articulation of successful practices and potential solutions to reduce migrant work precarity and exclusion. The literature on migrant workers' precarious employment experience is primarily focused on low-skilled sector (e.g. agriculture, hospitality, domestic care) jobs. In addition, few studies have explored the role of worker characteristics, such as gender, class, ethnicity, race and migration status, in shaping the experience of migrant workers in precarious employment.Practical implicationsThe results of this research highlight the importance of engaging multilevel actors in addressing migrant employment precarity, including policymakers, employers and employment agencies.Originality/valueThis research contributes to a growing conversation of migrant employment precarity by highlighting the heterogeneity of migrant groups and calling for the use of intersectional lenses to understand migrant workers' experiences of precarious employment.

Risk Shifts in the Gig Economy: The Normative Case for an Insurance Scheme against the Effects of Precarious Work*

Risk Shifts in the Gig Economy: The Normative Case for an Insurance Scheme against the Effects of Precarious Work*

Globalization and Willingness to Support the Poor in Developing Countries: An Experiment in India

Does an individual’s exposure to aspects of globalization impact their willingness to redistribute to the poor? We hypothesize that the “glitter” of foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries leads relatively better-off citizens to perceive that the poor now have more opportunities and are thereby less deserving of help. Findings from an experiment across three states in India reveal that subjects lower their financial support for the poor upon learning a foreign firm in a low-skilled sector is located in the vicinity. Text analysis of subjects’ responses supports the mechanism underlying our hypothesis: FDI reduces support for redistribution when subjects believe that foreign firms offer the uneducated poor higher wages and increased job opportunities.

Unwilling to Train? Firm Responses to the Colombian Apprenticeship Regulation

We study firm responses to a large-scale change in apprenticeship regulation in Colombia. The reform requires firms to train, setting apprentice quotas that vary discontinuously in firm size. We document strong heterogeneity in responses across sectors, where firms in sectors with high skill requirements tend to avoid training apprentices, while firms in low-skill sectors seek apprentices. Guided by these reduced-form findings, we structurally estimate firms’ training costs. Especially in high-skill sectors, many firms face large training costs, limiting their willingness to train apprentices. Yet, we find substantial overall benefits of expanding apprenticeship training, in particular when the supply of trained workers increases in general equilibrium. Finally, we show that counterfactual policies that take into account heterogeneity across sectors can deliver similar benefits from training while inducing less distortions in the firm-size distribution and in the allocation of resources across sectors.

Job competition, human capital, and the lock-in effect: can unemployment insurance efficiently allocate human capital

Abstract Workers, firms and policymakers often face a trade-off between shorter unemployment spells on the one hand, and better quality matches on the other. During recessions this manifests itself through job competition, where high skilled workers misallocate their labor to positions for which they are over-qualified in order get back to work faster. In the presence of job-specific human capital, as high skilled workers gain experience in this low skilled sector they may find themselves “locked in” to these jobs. This is because workers will not want to lose their seniority by searching for a job that better utilizes their general human capital. As a result, this misallocation can persist even in economic recoveries leading to inefficient outcomes. This paper explores such an economy and finds that a UI system that becomes more generous during a recession increases welfare and better allocates human capital over the business cycle.

Why Does Oil Matter?: Commuting and Aggregate Fluctuations

Oil price shocks are known to have a sizable macroeconomic impact, despite a relatively small fraction of total expenditures that is devoted to energy. Using micro data we document a significant effect of oil prices on labor supply and commuting distance, especially among low-skilled workers who face large commuting costs, relative to their wages. In addition, equity returns of firms in less skill-intensive industries are more sensitive to oil price fluctuations. Motivated by this empirical evidence, we employ a two-sector endogenous growth model with an oil-dependent commuting friction to examine the effect of oil shocks on employment, real wages, and growth, as well as equity prices. Negative oil supply shocks followed by oil price increases depress labor supply, especially in the less capital-intensive low-skill sector, where employment is most sensitive to the cost of commuting. As a result, output growth slows down in the medium run as innovation and capital are reallocated towards the less affected high-skill sector, resulting in subsequent rise in the skill premium.

A Measure of Interdependence: Skill in the Supply Chain

Economic development strategies often target high-skill and high-wage industries and occupations, but the relationship between skills and wages is uneven and complicated. This study offers a skill-centered, industry-level overview of this uneven landscape. Familiar data sources (input–output tables, industry–occupation matrices, and occupational skill profiles) are used to analyze skill demand across the U.S. automotive cluster. The author shows that the automotive industry depends on the high-level manufacturing skills of intermediate goods suppliers and highlights that the lower wages in these and lower-tier supply sectors may impede skill regeneration and upgrading. Economic and workforce development practitioners can use this analysis to begin or reinvigorate skill-centric conversations with employers in high- and low-skill sectors. Industry leaders can use it to demonstrate the extent to which larger firms rely on the skills of their supply network and to motivate investments in skill development across the supply chain.

How many educated workers for your economy? European targets, optimal public spending, and labor market impact

This paper studies optimal taxation schemes for education in a search-matching model where the labor market is divided between a high-skill and a low-skill sector. Two public policy targets - maximizing the total employment level and optimizing the social surplus - are studied according to three different public taxation strategies. We calibrate our model using evidence from thirteen European countries, and compare our results with the target from the Europe 2020 Agenda for achievement in higher education. We show that, with current labor market characteristics, the target set by governments seems compatible with the social surplus maximization objective for some countries, while being too high for other countries. For all countries, maximizing employment would imply higher educational spending than that required for the social surplus to reach its maximum.

The development of geographical differences in education levels within the Swedish tourism industry

ABSTRACTThe nexus of workforce and destination development is a largely uncharted area within tourism research. The local human capital has above all been in focus when underlining tourism's potential to create employment even for the inexperienced and less educated. However, a discordant strand of theory holds the low levels of qualified knowledge within the industry responsible for absent destination development in areas struggling to develop competitive advantages. Additionally, the in-migration of a skilled workforce may be hampered by a lack of amenities attracting permanent residents. In order to explore whether the tourism sector is characterized by a less educated share of the workforce, a study was performed using micro-level data on the full working population of Sweden during the years 2000–2010. The workforce in tourism was compared to the total and two other low-skill sectors, and the results show that the educational aspects within tourism are more related to geography than economic sectors. Contrary to general presumptions, the workforce within the tourism sector has a higher level of formal education than the other selected sectors in regions with generally low educational levels. The implication is thus that strategies aimed at creating employment for the least educated in rural areas need to be reconsidered, and not unconditionally target the tourism sector. Above all, tourism development needs to be based on assessments of local preconditions rather than a generalized image.

Introduction: Migration and Differential Labour Market Participation

Recent major political developments, including Brexit and the US presidential elections, have been strongly associated with public concerns around levels of immigration. Much of this has centred on the role of migrants in the low-skilled sectors of the economy and concerns that they have displaced members of local communities from jobs and depressed wage levels. This is despite compelling evidence that immigrants rarely take jobs from native workers in OECD countries (Constant, 2014) and that in the long run, the wage and employment effects of immigration in the 1990s and in the 2000s were small and always positive for less educated workers of all OECD countries (Docquieret al., 2014). Recent UK specific studies have found that the impact on wages is considered to be relatively small (Dustmannet al., 2013; Nickell and Salaheen, 2015). Notwithstanding this evidence, hostility to migrants and migration more generally has become increasingly overt, as reflected in a substantial rise in ‘race’ hate crimes before and following the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU in 2016 (Burnett, 2017).

Technology and labor regulations: theory and evidence

This paper shows that different labor market policies can lead to differences in technology across sectors in a model of labor saving technologies. Labor market regulations reduce the skill premium and as a result, if technologies are labor saving, countries with more stringent labor regulation, which bind more for low skilled workers, become less technologically advanced in their high skill sectors, but more technologically advanced in their low skill sectors. We then present data on capital-output ratios, on estimated productivity levels and on patent creation, which tend to support the predictions of our model.

It's all about the Flex: Preference, Flexibility and Power in the Employment of EU Migrants in Low-Skilled Sectors

In the last ten years, EU migrants have come to play an important role in the UK labour force. They have become increasingly present in low-skilled occupations, where the largest proportional increase has been migration from Eastern and Central European countries. Drawing on research carried out between November 2015 and July 2016 on the employment of EU migrants in the sectors of hospitality, food and drink and construction, we find that EU migrants have met employers’ needs for a flexible labour force but that the use of mobile workers in these sectors is long-standing. The prospect of a reduced supply of EU migrants following the UK's vote to leave the EU and the government's target of reducing net migration poses a challenge for employers. We explore the tension between political pressure and economic need through posing a range of options for new immigration policy post-Brexit.

Wage inequality, skill inequality, and employment: evidence and policy lessons from PIAAC

This paper investigates international differences in wage inequality and skills and whether a compressed wage distribution is associated with high unemployment across core OECD countries. Wage dispersion and wage structure are widely debated among policymakers; compressed wage structure is often perceived as an important cause of high unemployment. Firstly, this paper examines differences in wage dispersion across OECD countries and their link to skill dispersion. Some countries that have more compressed (dispersed) wage structures simultaneously have more compressed (dispersed) skill structures as well, and skill differences explain part of the differences in wage dispersion. However, even when accounted for skills, some countries have a more compressed wage structure, most likely caused by labor market institutions. We do not find an effect of wage compression on the labor market performance in the low-skill sector. Based on the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey of adult skills for core OECD countries, this paper cannot confirm the skill compression nor wage compression hypotheses. Rather than insisting on the deregulation of labor market institutions and reductions in public welfare policy as the main policy recommendations to achieve higher employment (and higher wage inequality), policymakers should reconsider aggregate demand deficiency and the variation in macroeconomic policies as potential explanations for the employment differences across countries. JEL Classification: J31, J24, E24

A Model of Capital Allocation, Education, and Job Choice in China

The narrowing wage gap between high- and low-skilled workers in the Chinese labor market in recent years is suggestive of government interventions which may have been implemented in the capital markets. We develop a game theoretic model between a continuum of heterogeneous workers and the government, where workers choose education levels, the government chooses its capital allocation strategy subject to a budget constraint, and the workers then make employment choices. The government is modeled as having a possible policy priority on particular industries or sectors. We characterize the existence and uniqueness conditions for equilibrium of the game and provide a closed form solution to the model for reasonable parameter values. We show that the wage ratio between high- and low-skilled workers decreases as government’s policy priority (or bias) toward low-skilled sectors increases, up to a threshold level of the policy bias. Beyond that threshold level, the wage gap between high- and low-skill workers is negative. Thus the shrinking wage gap can be explained by the government’s capital investment strategy which is driven by its policy priority bias. We derive comparative statics results and discuss policy implications.