Claudia Varella – Manuel Barcía, Wage-Earning Slaves. Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Book review: Claudia Varella – Manuel Barcía, Wage-Earning Slaves. Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press 2020, 217 p. ISBN 9781683401650.

Becoming a wage earned or a self-employed: Does Young Educational Level determine the Choice of the Working Labour Force Status in Cameroon?

If employment is recognized as a key driver for growth, development and well-being improvement, human capital is probably a main determinant of the labour force participation. By often analyzing this relationship in wage earning jobs, studies used to leave self-employment untreated despite the fact that its proportion is growing significantly in several countries. This leads us to the following question: does the accumulating human capital determine access to all forms of employment? Focusing on young people, this article analyzes effects of the educational level used as a proxy of the accumulating human capital on the choice of the working labour force status in Cameroon. Using discrete-choice models on data drew from the second Employment and Informal Sector Survey carried out by the National Institute of Statistics, empirical findings reveal that educated young people are more likely to make a decision to work as wage earned and the corresponding probability rises with the increasing of their educational levels. However, the willingness to become self-employed decline with the rising of the educational level. Therefore, compared to the decision to work as a wage earned, becoming a self-employed does not appear as a human capital outcome. This paradoxical result for a low wage economy suggests a reform of educational and training systems starting at least from high school with emphasizes in sectors with a high potential of self-employment development and a setting-up of an apprenticeship plan.

Reducing the constraints to school access and progress: Assessing the effects of a school scholarship program in Malawi

This study utilizes a non-equivalent groups research design to compare the educational experiences and outcomes of two student groups – those who did and those who did not receive a needs-based scholarship to attend secondary school and college in the Dowa, Kasungu, and Lilongwe Districts of Malawi. We assess impacts across a range of short and medium-term outcomes, including: school attendance, withdrawal, attainment, graduation, employment status, employment quality, and post-schooling income. The scholarship substantially reduces the household cost of participation in school, and reduces the distance travelled to school. As a result, we find that scholarship recipients attain between 1 and 1.5 years of additional school and graduate at higher rates. In terms of post-schooling outcomes, we find that recipients are in higher wage-earning occupations after leaving school. Overall, results suggest that scholarships are an effective demand-side strategy for improving schooling attainment, progression, and potentially longer-term labor market outcomes.

Six Decades of U.S. Tax Reform: Why has the Average Couple’s Tax Burden Increased?

We collect basic Federal tax laws over a 64-year period in order to simulate the historical effective tax rates of median income wage-earning couples. We find that effective income tax rates have decreased over the sample period; however, when payroll taxes are included in our calculations, total tax burdens have increased significantly. Interestingly, this increase in middle class wage taxation has occurred over an historical period in which total Federal tax revenue relative to GDP has remained somewhat constant. This implies that the middle class has borne an increasing relative tax burden in recent years. We hope that our analyses inform both the taxpaying public and policy makers of the historical status of middle class wage earners.

Bhutias of Sikkim

Bhutias of Sikkim, animal husbandry alone was not sufficient to sustain the population, so they indulged in marginal trading activities with the Tibetan across the borders. The barter of timber wood, dye stuffs and dairy products of that region for Tibetan salt and wool formed the basis of this trade. Bhutias of Sikkim (Lachung and Lachen) pursued it as an occupation intimately interwoven with pastoral activities. Thus, the trade was as long as unhampered by political restrictions, it enabled them to remain economically independent. However with the closing of the bordering 1962, social life changed of these people. Political events beyond their have led to the transformation of their traditional economic system, forcing them to reorient it. They lost large herds of yaks and sheep, when they were on the seasonal migration under the ancient trans-border pasture usage agreements. They could no longer use pasture land in Tibet, causing heavy losses of their herds due to lack of alternative pasture area. Bhutias started to shift from a pastoral and trading economy to a more settled agricultural and small scale horticulture and wage earning economy. The seasonal migration emerges as an activity organized by family and community structure. The Bhutias of Sikkim have adopted culturally to diverse natural landscapes and have established settlement patterns and production activities tailored to the limitation imposed by the region.

Time Allocation between Paid and Unpaid Work among Men and Women: An Empirical Study of Indian Villages

The paper examines the time allocation between paid work (wage earning or self-employed work generally termed as employment work) and unpaid (domestic chores/care work generally termed as non-employment work) along with wage rates, imputed earnings, and occupational structure among men and women and according to different social groups to establish the extent to which the rural labour market is discriminated by sex and social group. The major objective of the paper is to show the differential in wage income between men and women in farm and non-farm activities. The paper also shows the division of time between employment and non-employment activities by men and women. The paper uses high-frequency data and applies econometric techniques to know the factors behind time allocation among different activities across gender. The study finds that males spend more hours on employment work and work at a higher wage rate than females. As a result, a vast monetary income gap between men and women is observed, even though women worked more hours if employment and non-employment activities are jointly taken into consideration. Time spent on employment work and non-employment (mainly domestic chores) has been found to vary significantly due to social identity, household wealth, land, income, education, and skill. The segregation of labour market by sex was evident in this study, with men shifting to non-farm occupations with greater monetary returns and continued dependence on women’s farm activities. Enhancing the ownership of land and other assets, encouraging women’s participation particularly among minorities, and improving health are some of the policy recommendations directed from this study to enhance participation in employment work and shifting towards higher wage income employment.

Socio Economic Status and Time Management Skill of Women Teachers in Higher Education

The modern woman is toiling hard to prove her worth on the fronts, her household and her place of employment. Taking up careers creates the need for the homemakers to fulfill dual roles – homemaking and wage earning. Homemaking itself is a full time job, over which the career demands another eight to ten hours of homemaker’s time daily. Good time management provided the ability to keep a balance in our lives, or to recognize where the imbalance is. For instance, is all our focus on work rather than on leisure and social activities good? What about our family and those near and dear to us-are they allowed to play an important role in our lives, or are they constantly brushed to one side? The overall objective of the study is to analyze the socio economic conditions of women married teachers in Higher Education in Dindigul and to examine their time management practices and skill. The nature of adjustments made by the respondents to solve the problems mainly includes help from family members and friends, postponement of less important activity and use of leave. The study observed that for majority of the respondents, achieving of goals related to use of time is mainly due to proper use of available time and efficiency in attaining responsibilities in limited time. This again reflects how the women teachers are successful in meeting their responsibilities.

Wage-Earning Slaves

Wage-Earning Slaves is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments, long recognized as a distinctive feature of certain areas under Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a “path to manumission,” the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty. Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia trace the evolution of coartación in the context of urban and rural settings, documenting the lived experiences of slaves through primary sources from many different archives. They show that slave owners grew increasingly intolerant and abusive of the process and that the laws of coartación were not often followed in practice. The process did not become formalized as a contract between slaves and their masters until 1875, after abolition had already come. Varella and Barcia discuss how coartados did not see an improvement in their situation at this time but essentially became wage-earning slaves as they continued serving their former owners. The exhaustive research in this volume provides valuable insight into how slaves and their masters negotiated with each other in the ever-changing economic world of nineteenth-century Cuba, where freedom was not always absolute and where abuses and corruption most often prevailed.