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The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the multinational oil companies’ (MOCs) corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Nigeria. Its special focus is to investigate the impact of the global memorandum of understanding (GMoU) on women’s involvement in rural labour market in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

This paper adopts a survey research technique, aimed at gathering information from a representative sample of the population, as it is essentially cross-sectional, describing and interpreting the current situation. A total of 768 respondents were sampled across the rural areas of the Niger Delta region.

The results from the use of a combined propensity score matching and logit model indicate that CSR of the MOCs using GMoU model has recorded little but significant success in improving women’s participation in the labour market by freeing women’s time through labour-saving technologies and the provision of public services, raising women’s capital through education, eliminating discriminatory employment practices and capitalizing on public works programmes.

This suggest that the underlining causes of gender inequality in rural labour markets are institutional, including both social norms and the structure of labour market organizations, and can be holistically tackled through CSR programmes, government policies and building the strength of women in labour organizations.

This implies that reducing rural poverty requires not just the barriers to women’s participation in decent employment but also aiming for a policy that helps to change people’s perceptions of what is possible, beneficial and fair; fosters cooperative action; and strengthens women’s bargaining power in the work place, the home and the market place.

This research contributes to the gender debate in agriculture from a CSR perspective in developing countries and rationale for demands for social project by host communities. It concludes that business has an obligation to help in solving problems of public concern.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the development of China's rural labor markets and the identification of the important factors that affect rural labor's off-farm employment and migration.

Based on a set of long-term panel data, this paper makes a clear judgment on the trend of rural labor transfer. High-quality survey design makes it possible to examine the development of the rural labor market from multiple dimensions. Adding household fixed effects to the empirical model alleviates endogenous problems.

The authors find that the increasing trend toward off-farm employment, which is dominated by migration, has continued. There are some other important findings: (1). young male workers dominated off-farm employment, but the gap between groups continues to narrow; (2). the structure of employment is a good response to the economic transformation and (3). the quality of off-farm laborers, especially in terms of human capital, has also enhanced significantly and has continued to support off-farm employment and migration. These findings all indicate that the China's rural labor markets have been constantly improving in recent years, although there is still segmentation.

It is the first paper that uses a nationally representative survey data to address the development of rural labor market in the 21st century. With the help of a long-term panel data structure and by controlling the household-level fixed-effect, the authors obtained a deeper and more robust conclusion. Specifically, this article finds that whether it is for the off-farm transfer or the migration, the influence of labor age, gender, human capital and marital status is gradually weakening.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the trend of off-farm employment in rural China over the past four decades since the reform and opening-up.

Using two sets of panel survey data, the China National Rural Survey conducted in 2000 and 2008, and the China Rural Development Survey conducted in 2005, 2008, 2012 and 2016, this study offers a re-visit of China’s off-farm employment to give us the latest information about its evolution and whether rural labor markets have developed in a way that will allow them to facilitate the transformation of China’s economy more effectively. The evolution of off-farm employment is further examined through decomposition of types, destinations, industries, and population sub-groups as well as the change in the wage rate.

The data show the rapid increase in rural labor activities over the whole study period. Most notably, the authors findnd that a rapid rise in off-farm employment has continued even until after 2008 and into the mid-2010s, which is a time when some feared that macroeconomic conditions might keep rural residents on the farm or drive them back to the farm. In the disaggregation of labor market trends, the authors show that labor markets are acting consistently with an economy that is in transition from being dominated by agriculture to being dominated by other forms of production and with a population that is consistently becoming more urban.

The authors believe that the results will contribute positively to the exploration of answers to the question whether or not rural labor markets have developed in a way that will allow them to facilitate the transformation of China’s economy more effectively over the last four decades.

This paper explores the rural labor market impact of migration in China using cross-sectional data on rural households for the year 2007. A switching probit model is used to estimate the impact of belonging to a migrant-sending household on the individual occupational choice categorized in four binary decisions: farm work, wage work, self-employment, and housework. The paper then goes on to estimate how the impact of migration differs across different types of migrant households identified along two additional lines: remittances and migration history. Results show that individual occupational choice in rural China is responsive to migration, at both the individual and the family levels, but the impacts differ: individual migration experience favors subsequent local off-farm work, whereas at the family level, migration drives the left-behinds to farming rather than to off-farm activities. Our results also point to the interplay of various channels through which migration influences rural employment patterns.

The purpose of this paper is to take occupation opportunity as an indicator to examine the impact of hukou on labor market segmentation in China. It estimates the scale of the impact and identifies the way of the impact. Especially, the paper takes hukou uniform reform as an example and tests whether hukou reforms helped in eliminating labor market segmentation.

The data sets this paper adopted are the 2000 Census and 2005 Mini Census data in China. Linear model and Probit model are used in estimating hukou's impact. Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition is used in decomposing the difference in occupation distribution among hukou statuses. DID evaluation method is used in comparing the region with hukou uniform reform and the region without to capture the influence of the reform.

The result shows that occupation segmentation based on hukou significantly exists in urban labor market. Hukou uniform reform improved the occupation opportunity of local rural workers but migrating rural workers were somehow crowded out. Migrating urban workers did not benefit from the reform. To conclude these, the reform released employment segmentation between rural and urban workers within the reformed region but strengthened the segmentation between the local residents and outcomers which could influence future labor source and scale in reformed area.

The paper evaluates the hukou uniform reform's impact on the labor market using an empirical way for the first time and makes concrete policy recommendations based on these findings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine key determinants of farm labor market development in rural China.

Probit, Logit, and IV-Probit model are used to provide pertinent empirical analysis.

Analysis of survey data establishes three facts about the farm labor market in rural China: first, households with high farm endowment are more likely to hire farm labor; second, because of the mismatch between farm ability and land size created by egalitarian land reallocation, households with more land reallocations are more likely to participate in farm labor market to adjust such mismatch; third, land rental market and farm labor market seem to be complementary. These results are robust to alternative model specifications, subsamples, alternative dependent variables, and additional controls. Welfare analysis demonstrates that the farm labor market is conducive to agricultural output.

The main contribution of this study is to lay out stylized facts in terms of the development of farm labor market using a unique survey data set.

This chapter examines observed regional inequalities and centralization tendencies in Norway. Small, rural, municipalities experienced a favourable population development from 1970 to the mid-1980s. After this, the percentage population growth has been strongest in the largest municipalities/cities, and this tendency has accelerated during the last 10–15 years. Data post-1970 strongly support the reasonable hypothesis that population growth is positively related to centrality. The major source of changes lies within the labour market regions, whereas the changes between the regions are modest. Jobs have not become more centralized than households over the period.

A conceptual model is developed, offering a useful taxonomy of municipalities in three dimensions: the unemployment rate, the employment growth, and housing prices. This provides a classification that contributes to clarify the changes in the urban-rural divide. The discussion demonstrates that distinguishing between different categories is important, since different explanations of centralization and regional disparities call for different menus of policy instruments.

We study the relationship between population growth, unemployment rates, and employment growth in Norwegian municipalities, to distinguish between disequilibrium and equilibrium explanations of the situation in regional labour markets. At a national level our results indicate that neoclassical adjustments dominate weakly over amenity-based mechanisms. However, results from many regions support the hypothesis that amenity-based adjustments are dominant for municipalities within a labour market region. One possible explanation is that the diversity in job opportunities is considered as an amenity. A thicker labour market is better fit to meet the demand of workers with specific qualifications.

Credit is central in labour allocation decisions in smallholder agriculture in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of credit constraints on farm households’ labour allocation decisions in rural Burkina Faso.

The study used a direct elicitation approach of credit constraints and applied a farm household model to categorize households into four labour market participation regimes. A joint estimation of both the multinomial logit model and probit model was applied on survey data from Burkina Faso to assess the effect of credit constraint on the probability of choosing one of the four alternatives.

The results of the probit model showed that households’ endowment of livestock, access to news, and membership to an farmer-based organization were factors lowering the probability of being credit constrained in rural Burkina Faso. The multinomial logit model results showed that credit constraints negatively influenced the likelihood of a farm household to use hired labour in agricultural production and perhaps more importantly it induces farm households to hire out labour off farm. The results also showed that the other components of household characteristics and farm attributes are important factors determining the relative probability of selecting a particular labour market participation regime.

Facilitating access to credit in rural Burkina Faso can encourage farm households to use hired labour in agricultural production and thereby positively impacting farm productivity and relieving unemployment pressures.

In order to identify the effect of credit constraints on farm households’ labour decisions, this study examined farm households’ decisions of hiring on-farm labour, supplying labour off-farm or simultaneously hiring on-farm labour and supplying family labour off-farm under credit constraints using the direct elicitation approach of credit constraints. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine this problem in Burkina Faso.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons that children migrate without a parent.

The economic components of the answer to this question are considered by examining the correlates of out‐migration for children under 15 whose mothers reside in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India.

In this data 1 million children appear to have migrated away from home. On average 3 per cent of living children aged 5‐14 in the communities are away from home, but the fraction of out‐migrant children ranges between 0 and 29 per cent. The data are found to be consistent with a classical view of migration: children on average appear to migrate out of competitive, rural child labor markets for net financial gain.

The costs of migration are important. Children are less likely to migrate from more remote locations. Children are less likely to migrate from locations where child wages are higher. Overall, patterns of child migration away from their mothers look similar to what other researchers have observed in adult populations in different social and economic contexts.

The paper considers the determinants of child migration

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of education in the labor market and to understand how returns to education change over time in rural China.

Using nationally representative survey data from 2004 to 2015, this study provides insights on wage determination in the labor market and examines how the returns to education in rural China differ with time and educational endowment. This study applies ordinary least squares estimation and the Heckman selection model to estimate the returns to education.

The returns to education decreased during the observed years from more than 6 percent in 2004 to only about 3 percent in 2011, rising to nearly 4 percent in 2015. The overall trend is robust and observed within groups defined by education. Additionally, the returns to education vary greatly with educational endowment. Tertiary education has always maintained a high rate of returns at nearly 10 percent, while returns to senior high school education and below have gradually diminished.

The authors believe that the results will not only enrich studies on the returns to education in rural China, but also provide a basis for diagnosing the changes of rural labor market in the early twenty-first century.