IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/lunewp/2011_003.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Informal and Formal Sector Participation and Earnings in a LDC: The Importance of Time and Migration

Author

Listed:

Abstract

Theoretical and empirical research points to potentially different patterns of labor recruitment and importance of social networks in the formal and informal sector. The paper touches upon this topic and investigates the conjecture that employment chances and expected earnings depend differently on individuals’ allocation of time and mobility patterns in the informal and formal sector. This is investigated in a LDC context using a household survey from Guatemala (Encovi 2000). The results suggest that the probability to obtain employment in agriculture (informal sector) increases with the amount of time spent at the current residence. The results are reversed for (informal) uncovered wage workers. For the (informal) self-employed and the formal sector (covered wage workers) the results does not display any evident patterns. Merging all segments of the informal sector, the results show that expected earnings in the informal sector are slightly reduced by time not spent at the current residence.

Suggested Citation

  • Karpestam, Peter, 2011. "Informal and Formal Sector Participation and Earnings in a LDC: The Importance of Time and Migration," Working Papers 2011:3, Lund University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2011_003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://project.nek.lu.se/publications/workpap/papers/WP11_3.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    The Informal Sector; Labor; Migration; Time; Central America; Guatemala.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
    • J60 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - General
    • J70 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - General
    • O17 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Formal and Informal Sectors; Shadow Economy; Institutional Arrangements
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2011_003. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Iker Arregui Alegria (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/delunse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.