How Did the Great Recession Affect Different Types of Workers? Evidence from 17 Middle-Income Countries
[book]
Yoonyoung Cho, David Newhouse
2011
Policy Research Working Papers
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... bedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. This paper examines how different types of workers in 17 middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Impacts on different types of workers varied by country and were only weakly related to the severity of the shock. Among active workers, youth experienced by far the largest adverse impacts on employment, unemployment, and wage employment, particularly relative to older adults. The percentage employment reductions, for example, were greatest for youth in each sector of the economy, as firms reacted to the shock by substituting away from inexperienced workers. Employment rates, as a share of the population, also plummeted for men. Larger drops in male employment were primarily attributable to men's higher initial rate of employment, although men's concentration in the hard-hit industrial sector also played an important role. Within each sector, percentage employment declines were similar for men and women. Added worker effects among women were mild, even among less-educated workers. Differences in labor market outcomes across education groups and urban or rural residence tended to be smaller. These findings bolster the case for targeted support to displaced youth and wage employees. Programs targeted to female and unskilled workers should be undertaken with appropriate caution or empirical support from timely data, as they may not benefit the majority of affected workers. JEL Classification: E24, E32, J21, O15 This is consistent with firms, facing declining revenue and economic uncertainty, deciding to let go or not hire relatively inexperienced young workers. Second, a substantially larger share of men than women suffered adverse labor market impacts. Men's greater employment loss stems primarily from men's higher employment rates, and partly from their greater concentration in the hard-hit industrial sector. Gender differences in employment and wage employment, as a share of the population, were surprisingly high, comparable in size to the gap between youth and adults. Among active workers, however, increases in unemployment were only moderately greater for men than women. Unlike youth, men and women experienced roughly equal percentage reductions in employment within each sector, suggesting that individual employers were neither more nor less likely to shed workers of either gender.
doi:10.1596/1813-9450-5636
fatcat:t54npc4azzaidfypnbwmvjb6z4