Labour Economics

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    Investigating The Gender Wage Gap In the Nigerian Labour Market: A Distributional Approach
    (African Economic Research Consortium, 2024-04-10) Nwosu, Emmanuel O.; Orji, Anthony
    This study investigates the gender wage gap in Nigeria by extending the focus of the existing literature in two ways. First, we apply an extension of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition that relies on recentred influence function (RIF) regressions to analyze the gender wage gap at all points along the wage distribution. Second, we investigate changes in the gender wage gap between 2003/2004 and 2018/2019. The results unambiguously show that there is a significant gender wage gap in favour of men in Nigeria. This gap is statistically significant at all points of the wage distribution. Over time, we find that most of the wage difference is significantly accounted for by the wage structure effect, while the composition effect accounted for the wage gap at the lower end of the wage distribution during 2018/19. We also found a general decline in the gender wage gap along the entire wage distribution. In 2018/19, the gap is bigger at the bottom than at the top of the wage distribution, which is evidence in favour of a sticky floor in the Nigerian labour market. In terms of the contributions of individual covariates, we found that urban residence, unionization, education, public sector employment, and wage employment in agriculture has a significant reducing effect on the wage gap in favour of women. To address the gender wage gap in Nigeria, policy should focus more on ways to improve human capital among women and ensuring women are not segregated in top positions at the workplace. Key words: gender wage gap, quantile, recentred influence function, Nigeria, Nigerian labour market JEL Codes: C83; J08; J16; J21
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    Facilitating Regional Trade: Lessons from WAEMU and EAC on How to Increase Trade in CEMAC
    (African Economic Research Consortium, 2023-06) Nguenkwe, Ronie Bertrand
    This study explores the ways of facilitation and enhancing intra-CEMAC (Central African Economic and Monetary Community) trade, which has remained structurally weak over more than 20 years, by focusing on the East African Community and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The study uses a descriptive analysis of trade and the indicators of facilitation of trade in those three communities. An econometric analysis of factors underlying the level of trade in those three communities is conducted using an augmented gravity model. The econometric results demonstrate that the number of documents and the number of days required to export has a negative and significant impact on trade in EAC and WAEMU, but a positive impact in CEMAC. Infrastructure services, notably the use of the Internet have a negative impact on intra-zone trade in EAC.
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    Identification and Estimation of Quadratic Food Engel Curves: Evidence from Cameroon
    (African Economic Research Consortium, 2023-07) Wirba, Ebenezer Lemven
    In this paper we estimate quadratic food Engel curves using data from the 2001, 2007 and 2014 Cameroon household consumption surveys. To address potential mismeasurement of regressors, we employ the heteroscedasticity-based identification strategy. Exploratory non-parametric analyses suggest quadratic forms for the food Engel curves. The regression results in this study confirm these patterns. At lower spending levels, unit increases in total spending increase the food budget share, while at levels above the spending thresholds, unit increases in total spending reduce the food budget share. We also find evidence of major shifts in the quadratic food Engel curves over time. These findings suggest that reducing taxes on food items would be more beneficial to poor households.
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    The Impact of Armed Conflicts on Child Health in the Central African Republic
    (African Economic Research Consortium, 2023) Tchakounte, Dimitri; Loic, Molambo Sambi
    For several decades, the Central African Republic (CAR) has been the scene of a succession of coups that have been accompanied by armed conflicts in many prefectures of the country. Children often suffer high rates of acute malnutrition during these armed conflicts. This study aims to analyse the impact of the 2003-2008 and 2012-2014 armed conflicts on child health using data from the 2010 and 2018 Multiple Cluster Surveys of the Central African Republic. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting both temporal and spatial variation across birth and prefectures cohorts to measure child exposure to the conflicts. From the difference-in-difference estimation, we find that height-for-age Z-scores and weight-for-age Z-scores are, respectively, 0.518 and 0.242 standard deviations lower for children born during the war. We also examine the impact of the total duration of exposure to conflicts, and the results indicate that an additional month of exposure significantly reduces both height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores. We further perform robustness analysis, and the findings suggest that the effects are robust to considering the level of internally displaced persons across prefectures and the level of household wealth. As economic losses appear to be the most relevant mechanisms paired with the decline in child nutritional health in the CAR, interventions must promote agricultural empowerment of internally displaced persons, and initiate cash transfers and employment programmes aimed at rebuilding household assets in the absence of agricultural income. Moreover, rehabilitating basic social services, especially health infrastructure, can help alleviate the negative effects of conflict on child health through access to adequate health care during illness.
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    Global Value Chains and Industrialization in Africa
    (African Economic Research Consortium, 2023) Nguekeng, Bernard; Mignamissi, Dieudonné
    The objective of this study is to analyse the main effects of the integration of African countries in the global value chains (GVCs) on their industrialization level. To this effect, we have specified an industrialization equation that takes into account the economic characteristics of the continent. We have then estimated that equation by the system GMM estimator method on a sample of 51 African countries with panel data spanning the period 1996‒2018 sourced from international organization databases. The findings of the estimations are the following: (1) the participation and the position of African countries in GVC positively contribute to their industrialization. The imports of intermediate goods facilitate the access to foreign machinery and technologies, which stimulate local production. Furthermore, the position in value chains that are limited to assembling activities would also allow for achievement of significant industrial progress; (2) the main factors influencing the indirect transmission of GVC to industrialization are the human capital and the physical capital; (3) the results are stable as shown by several robustness check tests related to different modalities of integration in GVC, to the conception of a new participation indicator in GVC, and to sub-regional specificities. On the basis of these results, we recommend policy actions to enhance participation, but also to improve the position in GVC, while at the same time an appropriate strategy would be designed to accumulate human capital and physical capital in the long term.