International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
323 p., Despite sustained economic growth at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Latin America and the Caribbean still faces high inequality and weak indicators of well-being among certain population groups. Women, people of African ancestry, and indigenous peoples are often at the bottom of the income distribution. The share of female-headed households rose in the past 20 years. By the beginning of the 1990s, women headed 1.2 percent of complete households (households in which both husband and wife are present) and 79.8 percent of single- head households. This book presents a regional overview of gender and ethnic disparities in labor earnings during this last turn of the century. Latin America and the Caribbean provide a rich environment for studying social inequality, because historical inequalities along gender and ethnic lines persist, despite positive indicators of economic development.
Latin America is a region of sharp ethnic inequalities. Uruguay has usually been considered an exception to this pattern, although no data were available to confirm this assumption until recently. This article uses the Household Survey of 2006 to analyze the wage gap between Afro-descendants and whites through ordinary least square(OLS)equations, decompositions, and quantile regressions. The analysis finds that discrimination explains approximately 50 percent of the racial wage gap for men and 20 percent for women. Discrimination operates partly through occupational segregation. Differences in schooling are the most important explanatory factor for the rest of the gap. Quantile regressions show that discrimination declines across percentiles for men.
This article uses 1993 data from the Trinidad and Tobago Continuous Sample Survey of the Population to investigate patterns of remuneration across its public and private sectors. Findings highlight the possibility that the government is using its ability to pay its workers differentially in order to offset private sector ethnic and gender discrimination. Hence, the current move towards privatization of nationalized industries in Trinidad and Tobago is likely to have the impact of increasing ethnic and gender earnings inequity.
This analysis of 1980 Census data shows that in 1979 immigrant black men had higher employment rates than native-born black men, but the wages of employed members of the two groups were nearly the same. On a variety of employment and wage measures, black Jamaican and other Caribbean immigrant men in 1979 were remarkably similar to native-born black "movers" (men who had moved out of their state of birth by the Census date).
