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Although most rural households are involved in the farm sector, the nonfarm sector has grown significantly in recent decades, and its role in rural development has become increasingly important. This article examines the effect of participation in nonfarm activities on crop expenses of farm households in Nigeria. The relationship is modeled using a nonseparable agricultural household model that suggests that participating in nonfarm activities can relax the credit constraints facing farm households and reduce risk thereby helping households improve farm production and smooth consumption over time. The results show that participation in nonfarm activities by Nigerian farmers has a positive and significant effect on crop expenses and in particular on payments for hired labor and inorganic fertilizers. Separate analysis of the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria indicates that it is in the South-South and South-East zones where nonfarm participation appears to induce more hiring of labor. The results support the hypothesis that nonfarm participation helps relax liquidity constraints but suggests how that liquidity is used is zone-specific. In general, the results also indicate that liquidity is used more to pay for inputs into staple production as opposed to cash crops.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes aim to alleviate poverty through monetary and in-kind benefits, as well as reduce future incidence of poverty by encouraging investments in education, health and nutrition. The success of CCT programmes at reducing poverty depends on whether, and the extent to which, cash transfers affect adult work incentives. In this paper we examine whether the PROGRESA programme of Mexico affects adult participation in the labour market and overall adult leisure time, and we link these effects to the impact of the programme on poverty. Utilising the experimental design of PROGRESA's evaluation sample, we find that the programme does not have any significant effect on adult labour force participation and leisure time. Our findings on adult work incentives are reinforced further by the result that PROGRESA leads to a substantial reduction in poverty. The poverty reduction effects are stronger for the poverty gap and severity of poverty measures.

Is informal employment a safety net or a growth engine? To address this question, this paper studies the trends and cycles of informal employment. It first presents a theoretical model of long- and short-run behavior of informal labor. Then it analyzes these relationships empirically, using the share of self-employment in the labor force as the proxy for informal employment. In the long run, informality is larger when labor productivity is lower, government services weaker, and business flexibility less prevalent. In the short run, informal employment behaves counter-cyclically, indicating that it acts primarily as a safety net. The degree of counter-cyclicality, however, varies inversely with the size of informal labor itself.

The recent public economics literature involves an apparent consensus that income effects reduce the costs of raising revenues and hence increase the desirable level of public good provision. Higher taxes can indeed reduce the demand for leisure -- and hence increase the supply of taxed labor -- through income effects. However, the consensus is wrong because the income effects of taxes must be considered symmetrically with those from provision of public goods. This paper uses a model with multiple public goods and taxes to derive consistent measures of the marginal benefits of publicly-provided goods and their marginal social costs. With this model, the authors show that either compensated approaches excluding these income effects or uncompensated approaches including them may be used. If an uncompensated measure of the marginal cost of funds is used, however, the benefits of providing public goods should be adjusted with a simple, benefit multiplier not previously seen in the literature. Once this is done, the optimal level of public provision is independent of whether compensated or uncompensated approaches are used. Proper accounting for these income effects -- or their omission using a compensated approach -- appears to substantially raise the hurdle for government provision where there are substantial taxes bearing on labor.

This paper investigates the relationship between part-time work and job satisfaction using a recent household survey from Honduras. In contrast to previous work for developed countries, this paper does not find a preference for part-time work among women. Instead, both women and men tend to prefer full- time work, although the preference for working longer hours is stronger for men. Consistent with an interpretation of working part-time as luxury consumption, the paper finds that partnered women with children, poor women or women working in the informal sector are more likely to prefer full-time work than single women, partnered women without children, non-poor women or women working in the formal sector. These results have important implications for the design of family and child care policies in low-income countries.

We evaluate the effects of a self-employment program offered to welfare beneficiaries of a large safety net program in Argentina. The program promotes self-employment by providing financial and technical assistance. Our findings show that only a small and selected subset of welfare beneficiaries is attracted to this type of exit strategy (female household heads and more educated). Exploring non-experimental methods, we also show that in the short-run participation in the program affects the labor supply of participants, by reducing the probability of having an outside job and increasing the total number of hours worked. However, at least in the short-run, the intervention fails to produce income gains to the average participant.

Secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development. However, evaluation of the causal effects of land titling is a difficult task. Since 2004, a program called “Papel Passado” has issued titles to more than over 85,000 families and has the goal to reach 750,000. This paper examines the direct impact of securing a property title on child labor force participation. This study uses a comparison between two close and similar communities in the City of Osasco case. The key point of this case is that some units participate in the program and others do not. Estimates, generated using difference-in-difference econometric technique suggest that titling results in a substantial decrease in child labor force participation for the families that received the title compared with the others. This findings are relevant for future policy tools for dealing with informality and how it affects economic growth.

This paper provides a new definition of'time poverty'as working long hours and having no choice to do otherwise. An individual is time poor if he/she is working long hours and is also monetary poor, or would fall into monetary poverty if he/she were to reduce his/her working hours below a given time poverty line. Thus being time poor results from the combination of two conditions. First, the individual does not have enough time for rest and leisure once all working hours (whether spent in the labor market or doing household chores such as cooking, and fetching water and wood) are accounted for. Second, the individual cannot reduce his/her working time without either increasing the level of poverty of his/her household (if the household is already poor) or leading his/her household to fall into monetary poverty due to the loss in income or consumption associated with the reduction in working time (if the household is not originally poor). The paper applies the concepts of the traditional poverty literature to the analysis of time poverty and presents a case study using data for Guinea in 2002-03. Both univariate and multivariate results suggest that women are significantly more likely to be time poor than men.

This article empirically investigates how the transition to a market economy affected the relationship between motherhood and labour force outcomes in Poland. We estimate different probit models on two panel datasets covering a three-year period before the reform (1987-1989) and a three-year period afterwards (1994-1996). Contrary to a priori expectations, our findings indicate that during transition young children were much less of a deterrent to the employment probability of their mother than they were before transition.

This paper investigates wage gaps between part- and full-time women workers in six OECD countries in the mid-1990s. Using comparable micro-data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), for Canada, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the US, the paper first assesses cross-national variation in the direction, magnitude, and composition of the part-time/full-time wage differential. Then it analyzes variations across these countries in occupational segregation between part- and full-time workers. The paper finds a part-time wage penalty among women workers in all countries, except Sweden. Other than in Sweden, occupational differences between part- and full-time workers dominate the portion of the wage gap that is explained by observed differences between the two groups of workers. Across countries, the degree of occupational segregation between female part- and full-time workers is negatively correlated with the position of part-time workers' wages in the full-time wage distribution.

This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled The economic impact of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) treatment : labor supply in Western Kenya, conducted between 2003 and present in Kenya. The study observed the economic impacts of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment in Western Kenya on the individual level. Within six months, there is a 20 percent increase in the likelihood of participating in the labor force and a 35 percent increase in hours worked during the past week. For women, there is a large and significant increase of 20.8 percentage points in the labor force participation rate, but no significant increase in weekly hours worked. Since men have high levels of baseline participation to begin with, most of their response to improved health takes the form of additional hours worked. For women, baseline participation is low, so labor supply is the natural margin for change. For other household members, soon after initiation of ARV treatment for adult patients, there is a negative but insignificant change in the labor force participation rates of adults in the patients' households. For women in these households, the decline in labor supply is greater but not significant. The paper finds that the labor supply of younger boys in patients' households declines after the initiation of ARV therapy. In multiple patient households, both younger and older boys, as well as other adults in the household, work less after patients receive treatment. Funding for the study derived from the Economic and Social Research Council, Pfizer, The World Bank, Yale University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Social Science Research Council, and the Calderone Program at Columbia University.