The Dynamics of Women's Labour Supply in Developing Countries
Sonia Bhalotra and
Marcela Umana-Aponte ()
Additional contact information
Marcela Umana-Aponte: University of Bristol
No 4879, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
This paper investigates cyclicality in women's labour supply motivated by the hypothesis that it contributes to smoothing household consumption in environments characterized by income volatility. We use comparable individual data on about 1.1 million women in 63 developing and transition countries merged with country-level panel data on GDP during 1986-2006. The scope of these data is unprecedented in the small but growing literature on labour markets in developing countries. We find that the within-country relationship of women's employment and income is, on average, negative in Asia and Latin America but positive in Africa. We suggest that amongst reasons why African women behave differently are that the conventional family structure with income pooling is less the norm, there are fewer opportunities for paid employment, and aggregate income shocks are more closely tied to rainfall variation. The findings are robust to controls for country-specific trends and potentially correlated shocks. In Asia and Latin America, characteristics that strengthen counter-cyclical responses include low education, being married, being married to men with low education, low wealth, no landownings, rural residence and fertility. These findings suggest that insurance motives underpin the dynamics of women's work participation. Examination of cyclicality in the distribution of employment across types suggests that recessions in every region are associated with a rise in self-employment amongst women. In Asia and Latin America, there is a parallel rise in paid employment and a sharp drop in non-employment. In Africa, there is a decline in paid employment which overwhelms the rise in self-employment and this is how total employment comes to decline. The results have potentially important implications for understanding labour markets, fertility timing and child outcomes.
Keywords: Africa; insurance; women's labour supply; added worker effect; business cycles; dynamics; Asia; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2010-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-lab and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4879.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: The Dynamics of Women’s Labour Supply in Developing Countries (2010) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4879
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().