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Shattering the myths about U.S. trade policy
No full text“As they say on my own Cape Cod, a rising tide lifts all the boats,” declared U.S. President John F. Kennedy several times during the 1960s. That picturesque metaphor encapsulates the assumptions underlying America’s trade policy since the Marshall Plan in 1948, and it has served as the linchpin of U.S. competitiveness strategy ever since. However, the skeptics about free trade have been gaining influence over the past decade. The longest post-War expansion in America, from 1991 to 2000, ended when the dot-com bust led to a recession in which the U.S. manufacturing sector shed almost 3 million jobs. A sluggish economy (GDP growth averaged 2.3% from 2000 to 2007) and the rapid development of emerging markets shrank America’s share of global GDP by about 10%. The United States experienced large trade deficits and rapid increases in imports from developing countries, particularly China
Labour market: Analysis of the NIDS wave 1 and 2 datasets
No full textThis paper provides a brief summary of key labour market outcomes in Wave 2 of NIDS and also examines labour market transitions that occurred between Wave 1 and Wave 2. This corresponds approximately to changes between 2008 and 2010. The primary purpose of this paper is to spur discussion of these initial findings and to encourage more detailed analytical work on the labour market using the NIDS data.NIDS Dat
Concurrent sexual partnerships and sexually transmitted diseases among African men in Cape Town, South Africa
No full textBackground: Most studies that assess the relationship between concurrent sexual partnerships and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) use dichotomous measures of whether concurrency was reported or not. However, different forms of concurrency have different degrees of associated risk for disease transmission, and this should be considered. This paper examines variation in both partner concurrency and individual concurrency among African men in Cape Town, South Africa, and assesses the relationship between different types of concurrent partnerships and STDs.Methods: Longitudinal data from sexual partner history tables were used to form measures of concurrency, and the type of partner (main vs. non-main) and degree of condom use (consistent vs. inconsistent) associated with these concurrent relationships. Cross-sectional data from a self-administered module were also employed to assess the number of partners men had had concurrently and duration of individual concurrency. The association between the concurrency measures and self-reported STD status was assessed using probit regression models.Results: Substantial differences between concurrent sexual partnerships were observed and these variations were associated with different disease risk. Men had a significantly greater chance of having an STD when partner concurrency was associated with main partners and inconsistent condom-use, and when individual concurrency involved a greater number of partners concurrently and long-term partnerships.Conclusion: Partnership dynamics must be taken into account in studies assessing the role of concurrency in STD transmission and in STD prevention programs. Reducing concurrency (either in terms of number of partners or duration) and/or encouraging consistent condom use in concurrent partnerships would help reduce STD infections
Ethnic Solidarity and the Individual Determinants of Ethnic Identification
No full textThis paper examines the individual determinants of ethnic identification using large sample surveys (about 30,000 respondents) representative of seven capitals of West-African countries. A small model that relates ethnic identification to an investment in ethnic capital suggests that individuals initially deprived of social or human capital resort to ethnicity to get socially inserted, and do even more so if their ethnic group itself is well inserted. Empirical results are consistent with this simple theory. First, education lowers ethnic salience. Second, ethnic identification is higher for uneducated unemployed or informal workers who seek a new or better job, and is further raised by the share of the individuals ethnic group integrated on the job market. Third, ethnic identification is higher among migrants, and raised by the share of the migrants ethnic group that is employed. Group solidarity makes ethnic identity more salient for individuals deprived of other means for upward mobility
Schooling as a lottery: Racial differences in school advancement in urban South Africa
No full textThis paper analyzes the large racial differences in progress through secondary school in South Africa. Using recently collected longitudinal data we find that grade advancement is strongly associated with scores on a baseline literacy and numeracy test. In grades 8-11 the effect of these scores on grade progression is much stronger for white and coloured students than for African students, while there is no racial difference in the impact of the scores on passing the nationally standardized grade 12 matriculation exam. We develop a stochastic model of grade repetition that generates predictions consistent with these results. The model predicts that a larger stochastic component in the link between learning and measured performance will generate higher enrollment, higher failure rates, and a weaker link between ability and grade progression. The results suggest that grade progression in African schools is poorly linked to actual ability and learning. The results point to the importance of
considering the stochastic component of grade repetition in analyzing school systems with high failure rates.JEL classification codes
D1; I21; J24; O1
The Labour Supply of Sex Workers in Cape Town
No full textTraditional labour economics predicts that the supply of labour will increase as earnings increase. However, labour supply need not be positive, especially if workers make decisions based on short-term income targets. Income targeting may best describe jobs where workers decide on working hours and where wages are uncorrelated across days. This paper examines the labour supply of sex workers in Cape Town, whose working conditions largely fulfill these criteria. Contrary to traditional economic theory, we find evidence of a negative labour supply curve
Estimating the effect of adolescent fertility on educational attainment in Cape Town using a propensity score weighted regression
No full textWe estimate the effect of a teenage birth on the educational attainment of young mothers in Cape Town, South Africa. Longitudinal and retrospective data on youth from the CAPS dataset are used. We control for a number of early life and pre-fertility characteristics. We also reweight our data using a propensity score matching process to generate a more appropriate counterfactual group. Accounting for respondent characteristics reduces estimates of the effect of a teen birth on dropping out of school, successfully completing secondary school, and years of schooling attained. Our best estimates of the effect of a teen birth on high school graduation by ages 20 and 22 are -5.9 and -2.7 percentage points respectively. The former is significant at the 5% level,while the latter is not statistically significant. Thus, there appears to be some 'catching up' in educational attainment by teen mothers. We find only limited support for the hypothesis that there is heterogeneity in the effect of a teen birth, depending on the actual age of the first birth. By age 22, none of the estimates for high school graduation or years of schooling are statistically significant, regardless of the specific age at which the teen birth occurred. Despite this, we do find evidence that a teen birth does correlate with reduced educational expectations. The proportion of teen mothers who report an expected final educational attainment of high school graduation or greater is about 15 percentage points lower than the matched set of non-teen mothers, but this is not manifest amongst the girls whom we know will subsequently become teen mothers at some point after these expectations are measured
Early childbearing, human capital attainment and mortality risk
No full textThis paper uses a rich longitudinal dataset to examine the relationship between teen fertility and both subsequent educational outcomes and mortality risk in rural South Africa. Human capital deficits among teen mothers are large and significant, with earlier births associated with greater deficits. In contrast to many other studies, we find no clear evidence of selectivity into teen childbearing in either schooling trajectories or pre-fertility household characteristics. Enrolment rates among teen mothers only begin to drop in the period immediately preceding the birth and future teen mothers are not behind in their schooling relative to other girls. Older teen mothers and those further ahead in school for their age pre-birth are more likely to continue schooling after the birth. Following women over a six year period we document a higher mortality risk before the age of 30 for teen mothers that cannot be explained by household characteristics in early adulthood
How not to present poverty research results: The South African case
No full textBecause of their vital role in charting progress (or the lack thereof) in the pursuit of the povert y reduction, statistics are of obvious importance. In South Africa, these leave much to be desired.Disagreements among academics on the severity of poverty, the result of the failure of Statistics South Africa to conduct the appropriate surveys, are the inevitable result. Far from losing money (or sleep) as a result, some in the profession resort to further research, some of it quite highly paid, to squeeze new results out of old, often unreliable data. This could have serious consequences for the poor policy failure caused by faulty monitoring can easily damage the vulnerable. Regardless of the reliability or otherwise of their findings, it is argued in the present paper that researchers would do well to offer them in a way that minimises the possibility of their being misinterpreted and/or misrepresented, and that maximises the likelihood that the non-specialist reader will be able to understand them. It is common practice to give poverty estimates in the form of the (FGT) ratios suggested by Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (1984), often without accompanying estimates of the absolute magnitudes involved. This, the present paper claims, allows overly optimistic conclusions to be drawn, making possible the concealment of rising misery behind a veil of aggregate improvement.Commencing with a glance in the abstract at the FGT ratios, the paper concludes that in order for poverty statistics not to convey a misleading impression of changes in the phenomenon they seek to represent, the ratios have to be augmented with sufficient information of concurrent changes in the income distribution. Most poverty studies look at changes in inequality. Often, however, the inequality results are not linked directly to the changes in poverty. As far as income poverty is concerned, the present piece of research suggests that doing so is the only appropriate way to present results.Having sketched a conceptual foundation, the paper looks at the regurgitation by government, without comment, of poverty statistics that directly contradict each other. After that, the strange case of an undeserved accolade government awards its anti-poverty policies, is found to be based upon a misinterpretation of their own findings by the authors of a recent poverty and inequality study (Bhorat and van der Westhuizen, 2008).A new set of poverty and inequality estimates (Leibbrandt et al, 2010), although it does not conform to the mode of presentation suggested above as necessary, points (as do the Bhorat and van der Westhuizen findings) to the strong likelihood that although the poverty headcount ratio may have fallen since the advent of democracy in the country, the poverty headcount is likely to have risen by several million between 1993 and 2008.An appendix at the end of the paper offers a little speculation on what poverty levels might have been had the AIDS epidemic not killed so many people
The returns to formality and informality in urban Africa
No full textThis paper addresses the questions as to the size and causes of earnings differentials in two urban African labor markets, those of Ghana and Tanzania. We have panel data so we can ask how far time invariant unobservables, market ability for short, matters in the determination of earnings. We also have information on whether the individual is own self-employed, self-employed with employees, a private or public sector wage employee and the size of the enterprise in which wage employees work or which the self-employed owns. We find, mirroring work on developed economies, that unobserved individual market ability is by far the most important factor explaining the variance of earnings. With controls for such ability the gap between private wage employment and civil servants is about 50%. With controls for enterprise size we find that wage employees earn the same as the self-employed in both Ghana and Tanzania. Enterprise size matters. At most half of the OLS effect of size on earnings can be explained by unobservable ability. Workers in the largest firms are the high earners with wage rates which exceed those of civil servants. These results all assume exogenous movement. We find evidence that endogeneity bias may be serious and may be understating the extent of both the size effect and the private sector wage (negative) premium. The implications of our results for understanding the nature of formal and informal employment in Africa are discussed