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Within the framework of potential efforts and strategies to employment generation for young people in Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular, the agricultural sector is increasingly considered as an important sector and a valuable means for poverty reduction, the promotion of economic development, and youth's economic independence. Renewed hope is placed on the sector to offer sustainable livelihood prospects for the rural youth. Yet, the success and sustainability of the sector require a proper understanding of how households allocate youth labor time in the sector and whether agricultural labor supply is responsive to economic incentives such as shadow wages. Using gender- and age-specific plot-level panel data, we systematically analyze the impacts of shadow wages of each household member on youth agricultural labor supply across types of farms. The results indicate that agricultural shadow wages matter for the youth's labor supply in the sector, but the impact differs for male and female youth. We also show that trends and patterns of youth labor supply vary across gender and whether they work on their own farm, and so do their labor returns. The results are consistent after controlling for individual heterogeneity and instrumenting for possible endogeneity. Taking into account the intensity of youth's actual involvement in the family farm, own farm or off-farm work instead of their stated intentions, the results challenge the presumption that youth are abandoning agriculture, at least in agricultural potential areas of Ethiopia. Instead, the frequent narrative of youth disengaging from agriculture may be a result of methodological flaws or data limitations. The findings suggest that it is necessary to invest in agricultural development to enhance labor productivity and employability of young people in agriculture.

The market equilibrium model predicts that the supply and demand schedules of labor to an industry will cross at a level at which labor receives the value of its marginal product as contributed to the output produced. The imposition of an effective minimum wage in that industry creates a price floor for labor which will reduce employment as it promotes incentives to substitute capital for labor and/or workers with higher marginal productivity for those with lower skill and lower marginal productivity. This means in effect that it will lead employers to eliminate less productive jobs. Teenagers (youths 16–19 years old) with little training or work‐experience may be priced out of the market because they are not “worth” (in terms of productivity) the minimum wage.

Among the various factors influencing tourists to visit an overseas country is that of promotion/marketing activity by tourism operators and government tourist commissions in the destination country. The effects of tourism promotion have not previously been subjected to rigorous economic analysis however. The paper firstly shows how the standard economic justifications for government support of industry in circumstances of market failure, ie externalities/non appropriability of benefits, risk and uncertainty and indivisibilities, can be employed in the context of overseas tourism promotion to present a prima facie case for government support. It then provides an analysis of the benefits and costs of tourism promotion which is applicable to all countries. A model of tourism demand and supply is presented which enables consideration of the effects of tourism promotion in an economy with no distortions and an economy with distortions. The final section addresses issues in evaluating promotion and attempts to assess circumstances in which tourism promotion generates positive net benefits to an economy. Although the data apply to Australia, the results are generalizable. The framework of assessment can be used to assess the benefits and costs of tourism promotion in both developed and lesser developed countries.

Since the Second World War the Transnational Corporations (TNCs) have emerged as powerful engines of growth and development in the world economy. Much controversy surrounds the issues of TNCs' benign and malign effects on the development aspirations of host developing countries (HDCs). The TNCs exert immense economic power over HDCs by virtue of their proprietary control over a package of ingredients much sought after by HDCs. This TNC package comprises capital, technology, managerial talent, marketing networks, information and know‐how. The TNCs carefully safeguard their ownership of this package by patents, licences, trade‐marks and a variety of other legal devices. The ownership of the package enables TNCs to extract monopoly rents from HDCs.

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.

This paper aims to examine the role of off-farm work in the rural residential energy transition in China.

To guide this empirical work, the authors present a simple farm-household model to explain rural energy consumption. The authors then empirically assess three main mechanisms through which off-farm work can speed up energy transition in rural China using panel data methods.

The study shows that income growth from off-farm work can reduce the consumption of traditional biomass energy and facilitate a shift to commercial energy. The losses of labor available for on-farm production raise the shadow price of non-tradable biomass energy and further dampen the demand for traditional biomass energy. More importantly, the authors find that working in service sectors can significantly promote the consumption of commercial energy by rural households. The sectoral exposure effect indicates that a new working environment may influence rural households' energy preferences and thus accelerate the transition away from traditional biomass energy.

Previous studies focus mainly on the income effect of off-farm work on rural energy consumption. The authors first identify three related but essentially different effects of off-farm work on rural energy transition in China. This study provides new insights into the process of energy consumption transition in rural China.

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 objective of this chapter is to estimate the parameters defining female labor participation and occupation decisions in mexico. Based on a theoretical framework, we use micro data to estimate the wage-participation elasticity in urban Mexico. Consistency between the selectivity-adjusted wages and the multinomial participation equations is achieved via a two-step estimation procedure following Lee (1983). We use the results of our model to test and quantify three hypotheses explaining recent increases in female labor participation in urban mexico. Our results show that the observed 12 percent increase in female labor participation in mexico between 1994 and 2000 is explained by the combination of a negative income shock caused by the 1994–1995 participation; wage differentiaeso crisis, the increase in expected wages taking place in the manufacturing sector during the post-North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) period, and a reduction in female reservation wage.