Essays on inequality, vulnerability to poverty, international migration and labor supply: an application to Haiti
- Autores: Evans Jadotte
- Directores de la Tesis: Xavier Ramos Morilla (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2010
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Luis Ayala Cañón (presid.), Raúl Ramos Lobo (secret.), Christophe Mueller (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
The thesis presents a thorough analysis of distributional issues and the impact of migration and remittances on the labor market in Haiti. These are issues on which not much evidence had existed for this country. So, this work is very timely insofar as it comes to fill very important gaps in that respect. The research is structured into five chapters. The first and last chapters present, respectively, general introduction and general conclusion to the thesis.
The second chapter deals with inequality in Haiti. The approach to analyzing inequality adopted is that of decomposing inequality into various factor components using a regression-based decomposition method. The advantage offered by this approach is the flexibility regarding the number of factors accounted for in explaining inequality. Such flexibility is not found in the traditional decomposition methods, such as sub-group or source decomposition (and even the appraised Shapley decomposition). The most important determinants of inequality in this country are differences among geographical regions and education level. Meanwhile, sex differences seem not to have any bearing on inequality.
The third chapter investigates for the first time vulnerability to poverty in Haiti accounting for both the non-poor and the poor. Data requirements for vulnerability research are high; typically panel data or repeated cross-sections of similar design are needed. Data of that sort are in short supply in least developed countries and this has generally inhibited this type of studies there. The methodology adopted in this chapter circumvents the stringent data requirements by exploiting the short panel structure of nested data at different levels, which permits assessing vulnerability to poverty using a cross-section. Specifically, a three-level hierarchical model is developed to allow an assessment of idiosyncratic, meso-level, and covariate shocks in order to help uncover how at each level these shocks affect income generating ability. Thus, the study in this chapter advances the theoretical debate around vulnerability research as to the best estimation technique to be adopted when panel data or repeated cross-sections of similar design are not available.
The decomposition method reveals that vulnerability in Haiti is largely a rural phenomenon and also affect more individuals with low levels of schooling. Most importantly, among the different shocks affecting household's income, meso-level shocks are found to be more important than covariate shocks. This finding points to some interesting policy implications in decentralizing policies to alleviate vulnerability.
In chapter four, the study of international migration and its impact on the labor market in Haiti is made through the lenses of remittances, which are often a causatum of the former. A semi-parametric instrumental variable Tobit for continuous endogenous regressor (Newey's two-step) is used in the analysis. To deal with selectivity problems that arise from households' international migration decision not being exogenous, a zero-altered negative binomial model with logit inflation is estimated. The research in this chapter improves on the existing methodological approaches in estimating migration process by accounting for excess zeroes in count data in migration studies.
Results are in line with other findings in the literature. Remittances indeed exerts a negative effect on labor supply. The regular conjecture in the remittances literature is that in a developing country context such as Haiti this negative effect will be strong among women, especially when dependency ratios are high. The rationale for such a conjecture is that the shadow value of women's market wage lowers in the presence of remittances. This negative impact notwithstanding, the evidence from this chapter does not support the conjecture of a much greater sensitiveness of women's labor in the presence of remittances in Haiti. Most importantly, there is no strong evidence that remittances is promoting entrepreneurship in this Caribbean nation.
