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The book investigates the trends in earnings inequalities in developing countries to determine the main drivers.
List of contents
- Part One: Introduction
- Chapter 1 Introduction: the changing nature of work and inequality by Carlos Gradín, Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, and Kunal Sen
- Chapter 2 Data and methodology by Carlos Gradín, Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, and Kunal Sen
- Part Two: Cross-country analysis
- Chapter 3 Global divergence in the de-routinization of jobs by Piotr Lewandowski, Albert Park, and Simone Schotte
- Chapter 4 Cross-country patterns in structural transformation and inequality in developing countries by Carlos Gradín, Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, and Kunal Sen
- Part Three: Country Studies
- Chapter 5 Ghana: employment and inequality trends by Carlos Gradín and Simone Schotte
- Chapter 6 South Africa: employment and inequality trends by Haroon Bhorat, Kezia Lilenstein, Morné Oosthuizen, and Amy Thornton
- Chapter 7 Tunisia: employment and inequality trends by Minh-Phuong Le, Mohamed Ali Marouani, and Michelle Marshalian
- Chapter 8 Bangladesh: employment and inequality trends by Sayema Haque Bidisha, Tanveer Mahmood, and Mahir A. Rahman
- Chapter 9 China: employment and inequality trends by Chunbing Xing
- Chapter 10 India: employment and inequality trends by Saloni Khurana and Kanika Mahajan
- Chapter 11 Indonesia: employment and inequality trends by Arief Anshory Yusuf and Putri Riswani Halim
- Chapter 12 Argentina: employment and inequality trends by Roxana Maurizio and Ana Paula Monsalvo
- Chapter 13 Brazil: employment and inequality trends by Sergio Firpo, Alysson Portella, Flavio Riva, and Giovanna Úbida
- Chapter 14 Chile: employment and inequality trends by Gabriela Zapata-Román
- Chapter 15 Peru: employment and inequality trends by Jorge Dávalos and Paola Ballon
- Part Four: Conclusions
- Chapter 16 Conclusions and policy implications by Carlos Gradín, Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, and Kunal Sen
About the author
Carlos Gradín holds a PhD in economics (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 1999). He is Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Vigo, Spain, and has been a Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, Finland. His main research interests are poverty, inequality, and discrimination. He is especially interested in inequalities between population groups and deals with enhancing the empirical evidence as well as methodological tools for the measurement and understanding of those issues.
Piotr Lewandowski is a labour economist, a President of the Board at the Institute for Structural Research (IBS), Warsaw, Poland, and a Research Fellow at the IZA, Bonn, and RWI Essen, Germany. His research interests include the impact of technology on labour markets, structural and occupational change, job quality, minimum wage, energy poverty, and the labour market effects of climate and energy policies.
Simone Schotte is a development economist focusing on inequality, social stratification, and labour markets research. She is a Project Director at Finnish Overseas Consultants (FinnOC) and has been a Research Associate at UNU-WIDER as well as a consultant to the World Bank. She holds a PhD from the University of Göttingen and her research has been published in journals such as World Development, Journal of Economic Inequality, Journal of Development Studies, Kyklos, International Migration Review, among others.
Kunal Sen is Director of UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, Finland, and Professor of Development Economics, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK (on leave). He has over three decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research. He has performed extensive research on the political economy of growth and development, international finance, the dynamics of poverty, social exclusion, female labour force participation, and the informal sector in developing economies. His research has focused on India, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. He was awarded the Sanjaya Lall Prize in 2006 and the Dudley Seers Prize in 2003 for his publications.
Summary
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
The book investigates the trends in earnings inequalities in developing countries to determine the main drivers. Particular attention is paid to extending the most conventional explanations of changes in earnings inequality, based on the relative abundance of skilled and unskilled labour, with recent theories that put the nature of tasks performed by workers in their jobs, rather than their skills, at the centre of the analysis. The latter approach has helped to explain relevant patterns recently observed in the trends in earnings inequality in the US and other industrialized countries. Developed countries have experienced a polarization in earnings and in employment, namely stronger growth in the earnings and jobs for the most and least skilled workers at the expense of those in the middle. This pattern has been attributed to differences in tasks-whether a given job is routine and can be automated or offshored-rather than skills, and has reduced employment and incomes in typical middle-class jobs in manufacturing and services. However, this narrative has been developed in the context of mature industrialized economies on the frontier of technological change that have also seen a large set of activities offshored to emergent economies. Evidence for developing countries, however, is still scarce and faces bigger challenges, both conceptual, and in terms of gathering the necessary data on earnings and task content of jobs. This book presents the main results of the UNU-WIDER project, The Changing Nature of Work and Inequality, aiming to fill this knowledge gap.
