Do labor market regulations affect labor earnings in Ecuador?

Donna MacIsaac and Martin Rama

No 1717, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The authors use the 1994 Living Standards Measurement Survey to show that the impact of labor market regulations, namely mandated benefits, is mitigated by reducing the base earnings on which they are calculated. Therefore, market regulation neither accounts for labor market segmentation nor for slow growth and increased inequality alone. Ecuador's regulations do raise take-home pay, but less than the vast number of benefits would suggest. The increase in labor costs induced by compliance is even smaller than the corresponding increase in take-home pay, because mandated benefits are not subject to social security contributions or payroll taxes. Despite mandated benefits, wage differentials between industries are comparable to those in Bolivia, a country otherwise similar to Ecuador, yet known to have"flexible"labor markets. Compliance with these regulations is associated with significantly higher take-home pay only in the public sector and where trade unions are active -and it is unclear that merely changing the labor code would bring wages down in those two areas. The most dramatic earnings gap, the one between jobs in agriculture and the rest of the economy, appearsto be largely independent of either unions or labor laws. The authors conclude, therefore, that drastically streamlining the cumbersome labor laws, although welcome, would only produce moderate change.

Keywords: Public Health Promotion; Environmental Economics&Policies; Labor Policies; Labor Standards; Health Monitoring&Evaluation; Environmental Economics&Policies; Labor Standards; Labor Markets; Poverty Assessment; Labor Management and Relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-01-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... d/PDF/multi_page.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:wbk:wbrwps:1717

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().