Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America

This book examines the links between economic growth, changing employment conditions, and the reduction of poverty in Latin America in the 2000s.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book examines the links between economic growth, changing employment conditions, and the reduction of poverty in Latin America in the 2000s. Our analysis answers the following broad questions: Has economic growth resulted in gains in standards of living and reductions in poverty via improved labour market conditions in Latin America in the 2000s, and have these improvements halted or been reversed since the international crisis of 2008? How do the rate and character of economic growth, changes in the various employment and earnings indicators, and changes in poverty and inequality indicators relate to each other? Our contribution is an in-depth study of the multi-pronged growth-employment-poverty nexus based on a large number of labour market indicators (twelve e mployment and earnings indicators and four poverty and inequality indicators) for a large number of Latin American countries (sixteen of them). The book presents a positive and hopeful set of findings for the period 2000 to 2012/13. Economic growth took place and brought about improvements in almost all labour market indicators and consequent reductions in poverty rates. But not all improvements were equal in size or caused by the same things. Some macroeconomic factors were associated with changes in labour market conditions, some of them always in the welfare-improving direction and some others always in the welfare-reducing direction. Most countries in the region suffered a deterioration in at least some labour market indicators as a consequence of the international crisis of 2008, but the negative effects were reversed very quickly in most countries.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

PART I: Introduction
1: Introduction and motivation for the project
2: Data and methodology
PART II: Cross-Country Analysis
3: Changing labour market indicators and the rate of economic growth in Latin America during the 2000s
4: Cross-country patterns: economic growth rate and changes in labour market indicators
5: Within-country analysis of the growth-employment-poverty nexus: additional evidence
6: Conclusions from the cross-country analysis
Part III: Individual Country Analyses
7: Argentina
8: Bolivia
9: Brazil
10: Chile
11: Colombia
12: Costa Rica
13: Dominican Republic
14: Ecuador
15: El Salvador
16: Honduras
17: Mexico
18: Panama
19: Paraguay
20: Peru
21: Uruguay
22: Venezuela
Appendix 1: Evolution of labour market indicators over the 2000s by country
Appendix 2: Cross-country relationship between changes in labor market indicators and changes in macroeconomic variables during the 2000s
Appendi x 3: Evolution of macroeconomic variables over the 2000s by country