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Feminist contributions to debates on gender, poverty, and social justice have deepened our understanding of the ways gender as a structuring principle of social life and an embedded hierarchy of values produces different concepts and experience of poverty as well as adds new meaning to the idea of “human flourishing.” Gender inequality remains a major barrier to human development; the disadvantages facing women and girls are a major source of inequality; since women and girls are discriminated against in health, education, political representation, and labor market, which has negative repercussions for development of their capabilities and their freedom of choice, remaining far away from social justice (Nussbaum, 1995). Recent statistics show just how far societies are from achieving gender equality. In the above backdrop, the chapter focuses on the position and status of women in India in the realm of gender equality, poverty reduction, and social justice as well as the public actions viewed from India's perspectives. At the same time it highlights the importance of global actions in an endeavor to establish gender equality, breaking the chain of poverty trap and establishing social justice along with their fallouts in the subsequent years.

This study seeks to estimate union wage effect in the public and private sectors of Ghana, respectively. It also seeks to ascertain whether the union wage effect in the two sectors varies.

The authors use data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey 6 (GLSS 6, 2012/2013) and Ghana Labour Force Survey (GLFS, 2015). In terms of estimation technique, the authors employ the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique to estimate union wage effect in public and private sectors, respectively.

The findings indicate that union wage effect in the public sector is positive and higher relative to that of the private sector.

The findings imply that strict enforcement of Section 82 of Labour Act 2003 (Act 651) will curb the political influence of public sector unions over their employer (Government).

This research paper has not been presented to any journal for publication and it is the authors' original work.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-01-2023-0045

During the interwar period, the Netherlands experienced a phase of rapid industrialization and mechanization and saw the introduction of many new labor-saving techniques on the shop floor. This process, which went under the name “rationalization of production,” caused great concern in the labor movement and sparked an intensive debate over the existence and extent of technological (or permanent) unemployment. Although the problem of technological unemployment was denied by the mainstream economists of the day, the problem was addressed by left-wing, mathematically trained economists such as Theo van der Waerden and Jan Tinbergen. They sought for rigorous “scientific” arguments that would convince policymakers, colleagues, and the public of socialist employment policies.

This chapter shows that van der Waerden and Tinbergen used ever-increasing formal methods to face the issue of rationalization, which became politically relevant and controversial in the specific context of the interwar period. Their new scientific tools gave them esteem and influence. In their role as advisers to the government, they gained influence and were able to recommend policies that were in accordance with their political beliefs.

This study aims to investigate the heterogeneous results about the impact of temporary jobs on subsequent labour market performances and to provide policymakers with further information on the effects of temporary contracts under particular circumstances.

The authors present a quantitative systematic review on the debate about the “stepping stone vs dead end” hypothesis related to the causal effect of temporary jobs on future labour market performances.

Among 78 observations from 64 articles, 32% support the hypothesis according to which temporary contracts are a port of entry into stable employment positions, 23% report ambiguous or mixed findings and the remaining 45% provide evidence in favour of the dead end hypothesis. The results from meta-regressions suggest that the stepping stone effect is more likely to emerge when self-selectivity issues are dealt with. The studies focussing on temporary work agency jobs and casual/seasonal jobs support more easily the dead end hypothesis. Finally, in more recent years and when the unemployment rate is larger, the dead end hypothesis is more likely to prevail.

Although many studies have been published on this issue, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no recent analytic economic surveys on the “stepping stone vs dead end” debate. The main contribution of this article is to fill this gap.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there are concerns whether economies are becoming farther from equality and competency. While this matters to every economy, it is more crucial for developing ones who already suffer from income inequalities and lack of competency. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

This study uses an administrative data from the Iran's Social Security Organization (ISSO) that provides insurance to workers entitled to the Labor Law of Iran. The data contain more than 7,000,000 workers. The authors assess heterogeneous impact of the first wave of the pandemic by firms' size and average payment.

The authors’ estimation results indicate that, following the initiation of the pandemic, the workers whose corresponding firms are smaller, overall, are more prone to the pandemic and are more likely to submit a request for unemployment benefits. However, the relation is neither homogeneous across sectors nor linear among micro-sized firms. Few sectors indicate a positive relationship between size and likelihood of request submission, including cultural activity, shoemaking and clothing sectors. Besides the size, the authors investigate whether pay grades could explain the probability of becoming unemployed after the pandemic. Results show that workers whose corresponding firms pay less are more likely to submit a request. This is robust within different sectors.

The ISSO dataset is not a panel, so the authors cannot employ methods of causal inferences. The authors’ results should be seen as correlation; however, due to exogeneity and sharpness of the pandemic the result infers to some degree of causality. The data does not cover the informal sector, so the estimates are at lower boundary.

Administrative data on unemployment benefits during COVID-19 show that the pandemic interferes with competition by forcing low-paid workers and small firms to exit the market. This is an alarm for the competition in every economy, specially developing ones.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the occupational specialization in rural labor market by analyzing the nature of part-time farming in rural China and estimating the impact of off-farm experience on the individual’s persistence and exit of part-time farming as well as its heterogeneity.

Using the panel data collected in 100 villages and 2,000 households across five provinces in 2008, 2012 and 2016, this study provides insights on the nature of part-time farming in rural labor market and find the impact and mechanism of off-farm employment experience on exiting part-time farming by adopting event history analysis.

Part-time farming is a stable long-run occupation in rural labor market of China from 2008 to 2015. Off-farm employment experience generally has positive effects on long-term part-time farming and the probability of exiting part-time farming. It significantly promotes female to exit part-time farming.

Based on the two-sector model, this study builds a conceptual framework of off-farm experience and occupational specialization and sets a theoretical basis of hazard model when using event history analysis. This study contributes to identify the impact of off-farm experience on persistence and exiting part-time farming in recent years. The empirical findings support the policy of promoting off-farm employment to improve occupational specialization.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the economic impacts of China’s hukou system and propose the possible direction for future reform.

The study develops a framework to incorporate the hukou system into the economic growth model. Using prefecture city-level panel data covering 241 cities over the period 2004–2016 and applying the fixed effects and instrumental variable regression techniques, the authors investigated empirically the impacts of the hukou system on city economic growth.

The study provides three main findings. First, the city sector conditionally benefits from labour mobility deregulation that allows migrants to work in cities. Second, the hukou system has different impacts on economic growth among cities with different sizes and administrative levels. Third, to offset the costs of providing exclusive public services to the migrants, the big or high-administrative-level cities can use their high-valued hukou to attract the high-skilled migrants, but the small- or low-administrative-level cities do not have this advantage.

This study suggests that the key for further hukou system reform is how to deal with the hukou–welfare binding relationship.

The authors developed a theoretical framework and conducted an empirical analysis on the direct relationship between the hukou system and economic growth to reveal the mechanism of how does the hukou system influence the city economic growth and answer the question of why is the hukou system reform so hard in China. The framework also sheds some lights on explaining the success and failure of the hukou system reforms in the past 40 years.

The article clarifies the wage–employment relation in a developing country. Several years ago, many articles in the United States indicated that the relation between increasing wages and increasing unemployment is unclear. These articles from the United States are insufficient to be applicable to all countries, especially developing countries such as Colombia where institutions and the wage–employment relation differ from those in the United States.

A meta-analysis methodology was used as 28 estimates of long-run wage–employment elasticity in Colombia from 1998 to 2016 were analyzed.

This article provides insights into how real wages affect employment. Despite publication biases, results showed that a 1% increase in wages results in a 0.11% decline in employment in the long run.

Due to the publication bias, it is not considered how variables such as sectors, estimation strategies (panel data, partial adjustment, cointegration and non-linear least squares, among others), formal/informal urban sectors, government services and transportation, and qualified and unskilled workers affect the true elasticity value.

This paper includes implications for public policy because the results are important to minimum wages policy in a developing country.

There are no studies regarding the wage–employment relation in a developing country. The empirical results obtained in this article are useful for regulators, policy makers and researchers to understand whether employment is affected by real wages.

This paper investigates the influences of temporary contracts along several dimensions of well-being (physical and mental health, self-assessed health and happiness) for young Italian workers. Our paper contributes to the literature exploring some new aspects of the relationship between temporary jobs and well-being in a country not frequently analysed in previous literature. We focus on the gender gap in the well-being consequences of non-permanent jobs, the influence of financial support by family in reducing well-being effects caused by temporary contracts and the interaction between gender gap and family support. We find that temporary contracts are damaging in terms of psychological health and happiness mostly for young men and individuals without family economic support. On the other hand, women’s mental health is not affected by temporary contracts and they are even better off in terms of their mental health and well-being when receiving family economic support.

This study investigated the gender wage gap in Nigeria by analysing two waves of household surveys (in 2003–2004 and 2018–2019) in order to understand the dynamics or polarisation of the labour market in Nigeria in terms of the gender wage gap over time.

The study applied an extension of Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition that relies on the re-centred influence function (RIF) regressions to analyse the gender wage gap at all points along the wage distribution.

The results unambiguously show that there is a significant gender wage gap in Nigeria at all points along the wage distribution, such that for the two surveys used and after nearly two decades, men still earn more than women. That is, the log wage difference between males and females is statistically significant at all points between the 10th and the 90th quantiles. In 2003–2004 period, the authors found that most of the wage difference was significantly accounted for by the wage structure effect, whilst the composition effect was negative and only significant at the bottom of the wage distribution. Since the 2018–2019 period, the authors found that there has been a visible change such that most of the gender wage gap is now accounted for by the composition effect at all points along the wage distribution. Another interesting finding is that there has been a general decline in the gender wage gap along the entire wage distribution, such that inequality was higher in 2003–2004 than in 2018–2019. This decline is bigger at the top than at the bottom of the wage distribution. The authors also found that, contrary to some of the studies on the wage gap, the raw gaps for the two surveys appear to show inverted U-shape, but the gap has fallen quickly since the 2018–2019 period. Thus, the authors found strong evidence of a “sticky floor” compared to a “glass ceiling” effect in both periods, and this becomes more pronounced over time. In terms of the contributions of individual covariates on gender pay gap in Nigeria, the authors found that urban residence, unionisation, education and occupation variables exhibit major influence. However, the effects of covariates on the composition and wage structure components of the wage gap have changed over time.

The major policy implication of these findings is that to address the gender wage gap in Nigeria, policy should focus more on how labour is rewarded and improving human capital for women.

This study is a novel paper in Nigeria that has investigated the gender wage gap in Nigeria by extending the focus of literature in three ways. First, the authors applied an extension of Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition that relies on the RIF regressions to analyse the gender wage gap at all points along the wage distribution. Second, the authors used sample selection bias to account for the non-randomness of participation in wage employment. And third, the authors applied similar analysis to two waves of household surveys (in 2003/2004 and 2018/2019) in order to understand the dynamics or polarisation of the labour market in Nigeria in terms of the gender wage gap over time.