Female labour force participation and fertility

The levels of labor force participation by women in selected Asian countries were recorded in a series of censuses taken over a period of years. These levels were less influenced than male employment levels by economic conditions and more influenced by cultural traits of the country. Postwar trends seem to have fallen in Korea, risen in Singapore and the Philippines, and remained steady in Japan, Malaya, and Thailand. The limitations of these data are mentioned. In Thailand and West Malaysia greater percentages of women worked in agricultural than non-agricultural employment; in the Philippines, where women did not work so much in agricultural pursuits, their jobs were still in traditional rather than in development industries. In the cities of Bangkok, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur, fertility was lower for working than for non-working women. In rural agricultural areas, the fertility of working women was minimally higher, probably due to economic need of lar ger families. It is concluded that urban life separates the employment and the family roles of working women, leading to lowered fertility; this does not occur in rural areas. The creation of new roles for women alternative or supplementary to marriage and motherhood would result in lowered fertility. In high fertility Asian countries, policies directed toward greater participation of women in non-agricultural work and great er exposure to an urban lifestyle might achieve fertility reductions.     

The participation of women in the labour force of Latin America: fertility and other factors

The level of labor force participation among Latin American women, when compared with participation rates for other countries, is the lowest in the world. Only 20% or less of women 10 years of age and older are economically active. This level did not change much between 1950 and 1970. Few women work in agriculture. The following factors are considered for their effect on labor force participation of urban women: marital status, education, income, and the structure and stage of development of the society. Married women have a low participation rate. More highly educated women are more likely to work, but there must be demand for their work services. As the economy of various countries has progressed, female participation in domestic services has decreased, in industry has remained constant between 1960 and 1970, and in social services has expanded. It is concluded that work participation for married women will only increase with the following changes: 1) improved educational opportunities for women; 2) structural change and modernization in the economy; and 3) reduced family fertility. Changes in the first 2 factors are more important than reduced fertility. Since 1960, only Chile and Costa Rica have had a 25% decline in fertility rates.     

A review of the participation of disabled persons in the labour force: the Kenyan context

This paper presents a review of the challenges that disabled people experience in participating in the Kenyan labour market. It draws on existing literature and on a narrative of the experiences of one disabled academic in a Kenyan university to highlight some of the forms of discrimination that disabled people have to cope with in their workplaces. The goal is to further our understanding of the nature of barriers that disabled people face in the work environment in Kenya, with a view of exploring ways of addressing those barriers and developing some recommendations for improvement. It is clear from the interview with a disabled academic that, despite strides made by the Kenyan government in terms of enacting the Disability Act, which aims at boosting disabled people’s participation in employment, there is still a big gap between the law and its implementation. What is needed is constitutional change and implementation of the existing law at all levels, as well as provision of resources to support this change.     

The segregated participation of women in the Canadian labour force, 1941-71*

L'article examine les emplois des canadiennes principalement à partir des données du recensement. Malgré le changement des attitudes par rapport au travail féminin et l'accroissement considérable de la participation féminine dans la force du travail, la ségrégation professionnelle demeure virtuellement la même entre 1941 et 1971. La plupart des femmes au travail continuent àêtre concentrées dans quelques emplois, emplois à prédominance féminine. Les femmes se joignent à la force du travail par nécessitééconomique et on peut établir une relation entre l'accroissement de la participation féminine et de la disparitééconomique par une analyse des mouvements dans la distribution du revenu au cours des années et dans le nombre recevant un revenu dans chaque famille. Finalement, le bas salaire des femmes au travail et l'écart grandissant entre les hauts et les bas revenus ont été camouflés par l'énorme croissance du nombre de femmes mariées dans la force du travail. Using primarily census data, we examine the jobs held by Canadian women. Despite changing attitudes to women's work and despite the substantial growth in the labour force participation of women, occupational segregation stays virtually unchanged between 1941 and 1971. Most working women remain concentrated in a few jobs, jobs which are dominated by female workers. Economic need has been chiefly responsible for their joining the labour force, and a link can be established between increasing female participation and growing economic disparity by analysing shifts over the years in income distribution and in the number of income recipients per family. Finally, both the low pay for women workers and the growing disparity between high and low individual income recipients have been camouflaged by the tremendous growth in the number of married women in the labour force.     

Taxation and female participation in the labour market

A well established result in empirical economics is that male labour market participation does not respond much to changes in taxation but female participation does. This paper reviews a range of contributions relating to such decisions in the light of two further empirical studies on labour market decisions — one in low income households and the other in higher income households. One finding is that an important factor in decisions relating to female participation appears to be the continuing strength of the traditional division of labour by gender in households. The tax treatment of childcare also emerges as an issue both on first principles and as an influence on the labour market decisions of women (and particularly for women on low incomes).     

Fertility, labor force participation, and tastes: An economic psychology perspective

Economic and economic psychology models of wife's labor force participation and family size decisions are examined within the context of a marriage cohort. Among other results, it was found that tastes influence the demand for work and number of children, along with traditional economic determinants such as opportunity costs and income. Tastes have an especially strong impact when modeled as unobservables, in order to correct for measurement error. Further, the often observed empirical association between labor force participation and fertility is found to be spurious and not necessarily causal in nature. That is, labor force participation and fertility negatively covary largely as a consequence of common economic and taste antecedents and not due to reciprocal interactions. Hypotheses were tested using a new structural equation methodology.     

Immigrant workers in the Libyan labour force

Using a series of statistical analyses, this study assesses the importance of foreign labour in the Libyan economic and social structures over the last 30 years. It notes the development of a particular series of dependencies on such labour, especially in skilled and professional occupations. Despite the government's declared policy of Libyanization, the authors note the development of a parallel labour market of nationals and non‐nationals and the consequential difficulties of moving towards full implementation of such a policy.     

Female labour force integration and the alleviation of urban poverty: a case study of Kingston,Jamaica

The author posits that female labor force integration in Jamaica accomplishes little in alleviating poverty and making maximum use of human resources. Women are forced into employment in a labor market that limits their productivity. Women have greater needs to increase their economic activity due to price inflation and cuts in government spending. During the 1980s and early 1990s the country experienced stabilization and structural adjustment resulting in raised interest rates, reduced public sector employment, and deflated public expenditures. Urban population is particularly sensitive to monetary shifts due to dependency on social welfare benefits and lack of assets. Current strategies favor low wage creation in a supply-side export-oriented economy. These strategies were a by-product of import-substitution industrialization policies during the post-war period and greater control by multilateral financial institutions in Washington, D.C. The World Bank and US President Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative stressed export-oriented development. During the 1980s, Jamaican government failed to control fiscal policy, built up a huge external debt, and limited the ability of private businessmen to obtain money for investment in export-based production. Over the decade, uncompetitive production declined and light manufacturing increased. Although under 10% of new investment was in textile and apparel manufacturing, almost 50% of job creation occurred in this sector and 80% of all apparel workers were low-paid women. Devaluation occurred both in the exchange rate and in workers' job security, fringe benefits, union representation, and returns on skills. During 1977-89 women increased employment in the informal sector, which could not remain competitive under devaluation. Women's stratification in the labor market, high dependency burdens, and declining urban infrastructure create conditions of vulnerability for women in Jamaica.     

National Identity and Citizenship in the People's Republic of China and the Republic of Korea

Abstract  This paper points out the limitations of culturalist approaches to the PRC and the ROK and deals with factors that contribute to the legal definition of citizenship in those two counties. The understanding of political and economic interests, rather than cultural aspects, is important in explaining the changes of the definition of citizenship there. China institutionalized a state-centered national identity, while Korea constructed an ethnic-centered national identity as they became integrated into the international order as nation-states. However, both the PRC and ROK made important changes in their legal definitions of citizenship regardless of their distinct national identities in China and Korea.     

Regionalization,economic restructuring and labour migration in Singapore

This paper documents the impact of economic development on changes in employment and labour migration in Singapore.
High export-led growth and the relaxation of immigration policies in the late 1960s enabled employment of substantial numbers of unskilled foreign labour in manufacturing, construction and domestic service sectors. Unskilled foreign labour in Singapore now totals about 350,000 or 20 per cent of the labour force. It has made possible an augmentation of domestic labour supply and skills which helped Singapore to achieve higher rates of economic growth. On the negative side, the influx of foreigners has been cited as one possible cause of low productivity growth in the 1970s. In addition to the increased demand on housing, the social costs of crime and the potential economic consequence arising from strained diplomatic ties with the source countries are also areas of concern.
Economic development in the 1990s, characterized by the regionalization drive which relocates relatively resource-intensive operations of Singapore-based companies overseas, has led to increased retrenchments and a moderation of demand for foreign workers. The upgrading of remaining production operations in Singapore is expected to increase demand for workers with higher skill levels. Emigration of highly educated and skilled professionals from Singapore became a national concern in the late 1980s. However, with regionalization, the new challenge in the 1990s has become one of encouraging Singaporeans to temporarily take up overseas positions.
The future foreign labour pool in Singapore is expected to comprise a growing proportion of skilled workers to sustain the 7–8 per cent economic growth rate in the medium term. Slower economic growth in the developed economies and the internationally competitive salaries paid to professionals in Singapore are expected to continue to reduce the outflow of permanent emigrants from Singapore.     

Determinants of female labor force participation: A study of Seoul,South Korea, 1970–1980

This paper investigates the determinants of labor force participation of women living in male-headed households in Seoul, South Korea, at two points in time, 1970 and 1980. Analysis of data from the 1970 and 1980 Korean Population Censuses suggests that both women's educational level and the family economic status determine women's labor force participation in Seoul. Women with middle school education or above are more economically active than those with no education. Women from lower economic backgrounds are almost two to three times more likely to be employed than those in high-status families, controlling for age, number of children under 6, and marital status. However, this pattern is not found among women from the blue-collar wage-working families.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1988 meetings of the Population Association of America.     

Risky businesses: economic crisis in Argentina and the generative power of generations

Theory and Society - How are risk orientations shaped in the sphere of work beyond proximate structuring institutions? In the absence of clear organizational imperatives or institutional supports,...     

Unauthorized Mexican workers in the 1990 Los Angeles County labour force

By analysing how unauthorized Mexicans compare with seven other ethno'racial groups in Los Angeles County, separately and collectively, by educational attainment and time spent in the US, we find that unauthorized Mexicans had relatively fewer years of formal education (either in the US or in Mexico) and had been in the US a relatively fewer number of years than in-migrants of other ethno-racial backgrounds in 1990. These findings are then used as proxies to compare the human capital endowments of different ethno-racial groups. We next estimate the number of unauthorized Mexicans by occupation, industry and class of workers, and compare these distributions with the total labour force and with the other ethno-racial groups in Los Angeles County. To the extent that unauthorized Mexicans are found to be substitutes (complements) in the labour market, they can be expected to be a valid (invalid) empirical source of social tension and hence contemporary restrictionist immigration policy sentiment. Results show that amounts of human capital are positively related to the kinds of occupations filled. Analysis of the percentage of discordant pairs shows that unauthorized Mexicans are found to be most dissimilar (potential complements) to non-Latino (1) Anglos; (2) Blacks; (3) American Indians, Aleuts, and Eskimos; and (4) Asians and Pacific Islanders. Results also show that those ethno-racial groups most similar to (potential substitutes for) unauthorized Mexicans are (1) legal Mexican in-migrants and (2) other Latino foreign-born persons (both authorized and unauthorized). The ethno-racial group which falls into the intermediate realm of (dis)similarity is US-born Mexican. Consequently, for most persons residing in Los Angeles County the rise of restrictionist immigrant sentiment is not consistent with their labour market experiences, and restrictionist immigration policy, to the extent it is based on a labour market competition assumptions, may not be justified.     

White-collar workers in the labour process: the case of the Federal Republic of Germany

This paper examines the impact of new technology on the labour process and labour market position of clerical and administrative workers in The Federal Republic of Germany. Data are drawn from several recent major case studies of such workers by German research teams. The paper's contributions to the ‘Labour Process’ debate are twofold. Firstly, it examines the position of white-collar workers to show that, contrary to Braverman, their work situation differs crucially in several respects from that of manual workers, despite some convergence in recent decades. Secondly, it shows that variations in the organization of the labour process between capitalist societies are much wider than is commonly recognized. The paper argues that historically evolved social structural and cultural features shape the position of German white-collar workers in the labour process and distinguish it in several respects from that of comparable groups in Anglo-Saxon countries.     

Family life cycle and labour force behaviour of married women

A sociologist analyzed 1984 data on 18-49 year old Canadian women married to their 1st husband to examine the effect of certain variables on the probability that they work at 3 different stages of the family life cycle. The older the woman the less likely she would be working at each state. Age was most significant at stage 1 (married with no children) (p.05) and less significant at stage 3 (married with 1 or more children and expected no more) (p.1). Neither age nor marriage age determined wife's labor force participation at stage 2 (married with 1 or more children and expected more). Marriage age was positively related to labor force participation at stage 1 (p.1). At all stages, the more education a woman had the more likely she worked. This effect was significant at stage 3 (p.1). Place of birth had a significant negative effect on employment at stage 3 (p.05). Canadian-born women with children had a tendency not to work or not seek work (stages 2 and 3), but those with no children either worked or were seeking work. The age of the youngest child had no significant effect on labor force participation. The more children a woman in stage 3 had the more likely she did not work (p.1), but those in stage 2 were more likely to work even though the number of children did not strongly influence labor force participation. Husband's income had a small effect on labor force participation of wives at all stages, but it was significant at stages 1 and 3 (p.1). Husbands were more likely to have a favorable attitude toward employment of wives at stages 1 and 3, but it was only significant at stage 3 (p.05). Women at stage 2 preferred to combine work, often part time, and motherhood. This study suggests that labor force participation of mothers will most likely continue to grow.