Three essays on the colombian labour market: a macroeconomic perspective
- Autores: Sonia Alexandra Agudelo Ayala
- Directores de la Tesis: Hector Sala Lorda (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Esteve Sanromá i Meléndez (presid.), José María Arranz Muñoz (secret.), José Ramón García Martínez (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Economía Aplicada por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
This Ph.D. dissertation consists of three essays on the Colombian labour market. It aims to contribute to the academic discussion and bring new insights into the configuration of the labour markets in developing countries. The essays are presented across chapters one, two and three. Each one of these chapters has a research paper structure: introduction, theoretical background, empirical issues, results, and conclusions.
Our research is motivated from the scientific urge to understand more about the functioning and dynamics of the labour markets in developing countries. On this account, Colombia provides a salient experience to examine. The reason is twofold.
First, the Colombian economy represents a faithful example of the institutional reforms and the trade liberalization processes that were undertaken by most Latin American governments during the eighties and nineties. In the early nineties, in particular, the Colombian political authorities carried out a series of economic policy measures which led to a major structural change of the economy. Although such measures may have significantly affected the labour market through different channels (labour demand, wage setting and labour supply), the empirical literature for Colombia is still scarce and, thus, far from reaching a consensus on the economic effects of the institutional reforms and the liberalization processes. Even more disturbing is the fact that the common wisdom might have been critically shaping policy decisions during the last decade. In this context, this thesis aims to shed light on the wage and labour demand effects of the institutional and trade changes of the nineties.
Second, nowadays, Colombia is considered one of the successful economies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its economic growth rate since 2000 has evolved around 4% on average, the inflation rate has been steadily reduced to stabilize at 3%, and the informal employment rate fell by 5 percentage points. Nonetheless, this positive macroeconomic performance has also been accompanied by a large deterioration of the international competitiveness, since the trade deficit sharply increased from 0.2% of the GDP in 2000 to 12.4% in 2014. Even more, the unemployment rate persists and remains stubbornly high around 10%.
Why this high and persistent unemployment rate? Although the common wisdom has assumed that wages are downward rigid and that the job-creating sectors, for example the manufacturing industry, have hardly developed, no empirical evidence is provided in the literature. This thesis tries to fill this void: First, by checking the extent to which wage rigidities are relevant in Colombia and, second, by analyzing the demand for labour focusing on the manufacturing industry.
To sum up, this Ph.D. dissertation aims to shed new light on the evolution of two relevant variables of the Colombian labour market, real wages and employment. In Chapter 1, the discussion focuses on understanding the wage setting system in Colombia and assessing whether the changing institutional framework and the growing exposure to internationalization have altered the wage dynamics. In Chapter 2, this dissertation posits special attention on testing the extent to which wage rigidities are relevant in Colombia. We identify its causes and discuss the policy implications. Lastly, Chapter 3 provides an extensive analysis of the labour demand effects of international trade.
In this dissertation, we disclose three main findings about the Colombian labour market: (i) the wage setting system is not efficient and the institutional and trade reforms of the nineties did not yield to a proper transformation of the system, in which the workers' compensation faithfully reflects labour productivity. (ii) Real wages are downward rigid. (iii) Employment has become more sensitive to wage changes as a result of the internationalization of the economy. Policywise, the analysis and assessment of these results allow us to conclude that policy makers should envisage a far-reaching reform of the current wage setting process. This dissertation sheds light on the road to follow.
