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Using a panel data set of 160 economies from 1950 to 2018, this paper examines the relationship between military expenditures and economic, health‐related, education, environmental, and social indicators of sustainable development. The results generally suggest that the size of the military expenditures is negatively associated with educational attainment, life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality rates, female labor force participation, gender equality, and access to safe drinking water, electricity, basic sanitation, and positively correlated with mortality and poverty rates and air pollution. The findings are generally robust to different specifications and interact with GDP per capita; that is, the association of military spending with the development indicators is stronger (weaker) in less (more) developed economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a two-sector R&D-based growth model with congestion effects from increasing urban population density. We show that endogenous technological progress causes structural change if there are positive productivity spillovers from the modern to the traditional sector and Engel's law holds. In turn, urban congestion effects cause a productivity slowdown in the modern sector. Eventually, economic growth may cease in the long-run. We also show that land dilution by a larger workforce may give rise to negative scale effects on ( GDP) per capita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's labor supply in Sri Lanka has increased steadily since the early 1990s following economic reforms, but remains well below the level predicted by national income, a feature shared by a number of Asian and Latin American countries that have undergone similar reforms and economic growth. To understand the microeconomic determinants of women's work in Sri Lanka's growing economy, this paper estimates a binary‐choice model of married women's labor supply using household survey data spanning a 23‐year period. Decomposition and cohort analysis reveal that women have been drawn into the workforce through falling fertility rates, rising tertiary education, and declining income effects among younger generations, but other factors have undermined this positive trend. Educational attainment reduces married women's labor supply except at the tertiary level, consistent with social stigmas associated with married women in non‐white‐collar employment. The strict sectoral segregation of married women by education level supports this hypothesis. In addition, growth has been concentrated in low‐skilled sectors with self‐employment more prevalent, reducing employment prospects of educated women and prompting their labor force withdrawal. This suggests it is the structure of economic development, rather than speed, that matters for women's labor force activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the role of structural transformation in view of the remarkable growth performance of Sub‐Saharan African countries since the late 1990s. Our analysis covers 41 African countries over the period 1980 to 2014 and accounts for structural transformation by employing the analytical frameworks of (1) growth decomposition and (2) growth regression. Even though the low‐productive agricultural sector continues to employ most of the African workforce, our results reveal that structural transformation has taken place and that it has contributed significantly to African growth in the period 1980‐2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that a fertility rebound can occur as the female wage rate rises concomitantly with economic development. Under plausible conditions, capital accumulation raises the marginal product of labor and hence the female wage rate. Unless the economy is trapped in a lower equilibrium, the fertility rate starts to decline at a certain level of the female wage rate and then turns upward at a higher wage level, presenting a fertility rebound. For such fertility rebounds to appear without policy intervention, the availability of external child care at high female wage rates is crucially important. The external child‐care price must be lower at high female wage rates. Otherwise the fertility rate might continue to decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper formulates a two-country by two-factor by two-good dynamic Chamberlin–Heckscher–Ohlin model of international trade with endogenous time preferences. After proving the existence, uniqueness and local saddle-point stability of the steady state, we examine the relationship between initial factor endowment and trade patterns in the steady state. It will be shown that (i) given that the representative household in each country supplies an equal amount of labor, only intra-industry trade occurs in the steady state and (ii) other things being equal, the country with higher labor efficiency becomes the net exporter of the labor-intensive good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of agroforestry crops in South Asia has resulted in the reallocation of local agricultural resources, including labor force. Based on two‐wave panel data collected from more than 600 smallholder rubber farmers in southwest China, this study examines the impacts of rubber expansion on the migration of rural labor. The results show that smallholders planting more rubber plantations have significantly fewer migrant family members and lower likelihood of migration, revealing a significantly negative effect of rubber cultivation on the migration of rural labor. Given that the migration of rural labor is a major trend in rural economic transformation, rubber farming appears to result in the resource curse in rubber planting areas. In addition, a positive interaction effect between rubber cultivation and the price of natural rubber on the migration of rural labor reveals that the resource curse effect of natural rubber decreases with the decrease in the price of natural rubber. A period with a relatively low price of natural rubber provides an opportunity to foster the migration of rural labor in rubber planting areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze gender bias in school enrollment by developing a two-period model where women become part of extended families of their in-laws. Each family decides how many sons and daughters are sent to school and thus become skilled. Gender bias occurs due to failure of the families to internalize inter-household externalities. “Groom-specific” dowry worsens the situation. Under “bride-specific” dowry, bias exists if and only if the skill premium in the labor market is bigger than that in the marriage market. A specific discriminatory “food-for-education” policy is shown to reduce bias, but increase total enrollment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with real option theory, the authors argue that the value of the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in rural India and its impact on workers' behavior does not depend so much on its income supplementation as on enlargement of opportunities in the uncertain local labor market. The choice between the EGS and other activities is modeled in a dynamic optimization framework, taking into account a fixed wage rate and certainty of employment under the EGS and a stochastic wage rate under other activities. Specifically, volatility of wages in the rural labor markets has important implications for switches into the EGS and for concomitant welfare effects. Under such conditions, the higher the EGS wage, the greater is its attractiveness to relatively skilled and affluent workers, and for those already in it to continue. These and related predictions of the model are validated by panel data estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction between increased Southern trade integration (globalization) and labor market frictions is analyzed in a dynamic general-equilibrium North–South nonscale growth model with endogenous Northern innovation and endogenous Southern imitation. The qualitative employment, growth, and relative-wage effects of globalization are shown to depend crucially on the degree of Northern labor market frictions. I demonstrate that only Northern countries with particularly large labor market adjustment costs for both firms and workers benefit from globalization in terms of permanently lower unemployment, temporarily faster growth, and permanently higher wages. This is because of the resulting general-equilibrium feedback effects of Northern labor market frictions that deter Southern imitation incentives. The result does not imply the recommendation to increase Northern labor market rigidities, but it challenges the common belief that labor market flexibility helps Northern countries to better adjust to the “globalization threat” coming from the South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]