Publication: Working Long Hours and Having No Choice: Time Poverty in Guinea
No Thumbnail Available
Published
2010
ISSN
13545701
Date
2012-03-30
Author(s)
Bardasi, Elena
Editor(s)
Abstract
This contribution provides a new definition of time poverty as working long hours without choice because an individual's household is poor or would be at risk of falling into poverty if the individual reduced her working hours below a certain time-poverty line. Time poverty is thus understood as the lack of enough time for rest and leisure after accounting for the time that has to be spent working, whether in the labor market, doing domestic work, or performing other activities such as fetching water and wood. The study applies the concepts used in the traditional poverty literature to measure time poverty defined in this new way to analyze its determinants in Guinea from 2002 to 2003. It finds that women are more likely to be time poor than men in Guinea, and even more so according to this new definition.
Link to Data Set
Digital Object Identifier
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Working Long Hours and Having No Choice : Time Poverty in Guinea(2009-06-01)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.Publication Who Pays the Most for Water? Alternative Providers and Service Costs in Niger(2008)Despite water being subsidized in most developing countries, poorer households end up paying more per unit of consumption because they are generally not connected to the network and, as a result, are forced to buy water from public fountains or street vendors at a higher price. In this note, we use a unique survey of Niamey households including information on water consumption and expenditure from different sources to estimate unit costs of service provision for water, looking at differences in costs according to both service provider and household poverty status. Our results indicate that the poor pay much higher unit prices for the water they consume than better off households who are connected to the network.Publication Work-Related Migration and Poverty Reduction in Nepal(2010)Using two rounds of nationally representative household survey data in this study, we measure the impact on poverty in Nepal of local and international migration for work. We apply an instrumental variables approach to deal with nonrandom selection of migrants and simulate various scenarios for the different levels of migration comparing observed and counterfactual household expenditure distribution. Our results indicate that one-fifth of the poverty reduction in Nepal occurring between 1995 and 2004 can be attributed to higher levels of work-related migration and remittances sent home. We also show that while the increase in international work-related migration was the leading cause of this poverty reduction, domestic migration also played an important role. Our findings demonstrate that strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction in Nepal should consider aspects of the dynamics of domestic and international migration.Publication Working for Less? Women's Part-Time Wage Penalties across Countries(2008)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.Publication Estimating the Poverty Impacts of Trade Liberalization(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-02)As a new round of World Trade Organization negotiations is being launched with greater emphasis on developing country participation, a body of literature is emerging which quantifies how international trade affects the poor in developing countries. In this survey of the literature, the author summarizes and classifies 35 trade and poverty studies into four methodological categories; cross-country regression, partial-equilibrium and cost-of-living analysis, general-equilibrium simulation, and micro-macro synthesis. These categories include a broad range of methodologies in current use. The continuum of approaches is bounded on one end by econometric analysis of household expenditure data, which is the traditional domain of poverty specialists, and sometimes labeled the "bottoms-up" approach. On the other end of the continuum are computable general equilibrium models based on national accounts data, or what might be called the "top-down" approach. Another feature of several recent trade and poverty studies--and one of the primary conclusions to emerge from the October 2000 "Conference on Poverty and the International Economy," sponsored by Globkom and the World Bank--is the recognition that factor markets are perhaps the most important link between trade and poverty, since households tend to be much more specialized in income than they are in consumption. Meanwhile, survet data on the income sources of developing country households has become increasingly available. As a result, this survey gives particular emphasis to the means by which studies address factor market links between trade and poverty. The general conclusion of the author's survey is that any analysis of trade and poverty needs to be informed by both the bottom-up and top-down perspectives. Indeed, recent "two-step" micro-macro studies sequentially link these two types of frameworks, such that general equilibrium mechanisms are incorporated along with detailed household survey information. Another methodology in a similar spirit and also increasingly used involves incorporating large numbers of surveyed households into a general-equilibrium simulation model. Although most of these studies have so far been limited to a single region, these approaches can be readily adapted for multi-region modeling so that trade and poverty comparisons can be made across countries within a consistent framework.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
No results found.