Job displacement and individual earnings in a developing economy: Indonesia

Date： 16:30-18:30, 1 March (Thu.) 2018
Venue： Tonan Tei　(Room No. 201) on the 2nd floor of Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Speaker： Ian Coxhead, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title： Job displacement and jobless growth in a developing economy: Indonesia

Paper is available at,
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3bb53uay22lq7s7/Shrestha-Coxhead%20Displacement%20ADBI.pdf?dl=0

Abstract:
In Indonesia, an export boom and sustained, rapid GDP growth in the decade after 2000 was accompanied by real earnings that were flat on average, and even declining for many workers.
Conventional models of growth and trade predict that labor productivity rises as an economy develops; that this should not be observed during a period of high GDP growth is a puzzle that merits careful investigation.

In this paper we explore these seemingly paradoxical trends using several waves of a panel of individual employment data. Economic growth is rarely balanced in a sectoral sense, and the nature of the structural change experienced by Indonesia is also strongly associated with lower competitiveness in sectors where formal employment rates are high, causing some degree of involuntary labor movement from formal to informal modes of employment. We explore this econometrically and find that the earnings of workers displaced from formal to informal jobs are significantly lower relative to workers who remain in the formal market. The fact of this displacement, and its implications for individual earnings, undercuts conventional thinking about the welfare gains from a sustained growth experience. Our findings add, perhaps for the first time, a developing-country dimension to the existing job displacement literature. They also shed some light on the causes of Indonesia’s unprecedented increase in inequality during the same growth epoch.

Ian Coxhead is a Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM). He is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UWM; he served as Director from 2002 to 2005. He is now a Visiting Scholar, Kobe University. He specializes in the study of growth, trade and
development, with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia. He has published many articles in refereed journals including American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Agricultural Economics, and World Development. He has also edited Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Economics.