G²LM|LIC

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Gender Gaps: Back and Here to Stay? Evidence from Skilled Ugandan Workers during COVID-19

The labor market outcomes of COVID-19 in developing countries are just starting to be thoroughly investigated. Given that the state capacity to sustain jobs through retention schemes is much more reduced than in high-income counterparts, the capacity to work from home is much scarcer, it would not be correct to extrapolate results from other countries in different legal and economic environments. Beyond that, research in high-income countries has already shown that the pandemic has disproportionately affected women and young adults. The former have had disproportionate increases in their household work and childcare hours, while the latter have been affected at their early career stages.

To examine these issues in Uganda, the researchers collected high-frequency phone data between January 2020 and September 2021. With it, they found that even after the end of the first lockdown, as recovery was already on its way and men were re-entering their jobs, women suffered a gender gap of 20 percentage points in terms of employment. This gap persisted, and thus 18 months after the beginning of the outbreak, 10 per cent of women previously employed had left the labor market, while 35 per cent solely remained occasionally employed.  Read the detailed Working Paper here.

G²LM|LIC COVID-19 Research Meeting: Experts Call for Targeted Local Policies and Long-Term Global Commitment

The COVID-19 pandemic has crippled the world economy, and low-income countries were hit the hardest. To explore emerging policy solutions based on the newest findings on the impact of the pandemic in LICs, G²LM|LIC convened a research meeting on its COVID-19 research projects.

Simone G. Schaner of the University of Southern California, Atiya Rahman of BRAC University, Michelle Layvant of UC Berkeley, and Nathan Fiala of the University of Connecticut discussed a wide range of topics covering rural-urban migration, the current situation of SMEs, long term labor market outcomes, the resilience of micro-entrepreneurs in the informal sector and among others.

  • Simone Schaner and her team found that in India, migrants who were able to move back to urban areas and secured employment earned more than those left behind. Among those who returned, female workers struggle more to earn pre-pandemic level wages than men. Read about the project here.
  • Atiya Rahman and her team conducted a large-scale panel survey to examine how cottage and microenterprises in Bangladesh have been coping with Covid-19. In July 2020, sales were less than half of that of pre-Covid levels, and only about 60% of enterprises were fully open. However, by January 2021, 97% of the enterprises were fully open for business. Although there was an initial stimulus, these SMEs have hardly received any financial support suggesting barriers to accessing such incentives. Read about the project here.
  • Nathan Fiala presented how higher human capital and more durable assets induced by cash transfers (CT) made individuals more resilient to COVID-19 shocks in Uganda from a 12-year follow-up of a CT intervention. Read about the project here.
  • Finally, Michelle Layvant’s research highlighted the importance of understanding female labor market outcomes and home learning. Read about the project here.

Apart from targeted policy solutions from local governments, researchers are calling for a global commitment to ease the post-pandemic economic burden.

Assessing the labor market impact of COVID-19 on women with young children in Egypt

The COVID-19 Pandemic has disrupted many routines, labor and services that have helped to cope with responsibilities in general. Due to gender norms in many developing countries, this has come together with a sudden increase in the responsibilities of women within the household, as COVID closures have obligated families, and especially mothers, to attend childcare themselves for much more extended periods of time. It is therefore clear that this burden hinders the capacity of many mothers to undergo employment work and thus continue being (or become) an active member of the labor force.

In this paper, researchers thus set themselves to analyse the situation of women with young children in Egypt during the Pandemic by assessing a survey where respondents are located in the Greater Cairo area. Initial results indicate that school and nursery closures have increased the burden of women especially, while that of men within the household has remained, on average, considerably less changed. Answers to the questions of the survey also indicate, that due to a lack of information, many women are, for instance, not aware of available nursery services close to their homes and that the current supply comes at a cost that does not match the average willingness to pay for these services. While the employment rate of women in Egypt was already falling before the pandemic, these facts denote how further constraints have been added to women in search for labor force participation. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

A small selection of our Projects

Our newest publications

Childcare, Labor Supply, and Business Development: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

In a field experiment in Uganda, mothers of young children are randomly offered a childcare subsidy, an equivalent cash grant, both or nothing. Childcare leads to a 44 percent increase in household income, which is at least as large as the impact of the cash grant and driven by an increase in mothers’ business revenues and fathers’ wage earnings. The childcare subsidy also improves child development while the cash grant does not. Overall, our findings demonstrate that childcare subsidies can be an effective policy to simultaneously promote child development and reduce poverty in a low-income context.

Intergenerational Mobility in India: New Methods and Estimates across Time, Space and Communities

We study intergenerational mobility in India over time, across groups, and across space. We show that the modern set of rank-based mobility measures can be at best partially identified with education data. We develop a new measure of upward mobility that works well under data constraints common in developing countries. We find that intergenerational mobility in India has been constant and low since before liberalization. Among boys, rising mobility for Scheduled Castes is almost exactly offset by declining mobility among Muslims, a comparably sized group with few constitutional protections. Mobility among girls is lower, with less crossgroup variation over time. Mobility is highest in places that are southern, urban, and have high average education levels. A natural experiment suggests that affirmative action for Scheduled Castes has substantially improved their mobility. Our measures are relevant for the study of mobility in poorer countries and in historical contexts.

Glass Walls: Experimental Evidence on Access Constraints Faced by Women

Access barriers can substantially constrain individuals from obtaining benefits. Using experimental evidence from Pakistan, we show distance poses a major hurdle for women in accessing a valued and subsidized skills training program. Women who have to travel a few kilometers outside their village for training are four times less likely to complete it than those whose village received a training center. This penalty is not readily reconciled with measured financial or time costs of travel and over half of it is incurred upon crossing the village boundary. Exogenous stipend variation reveals this “boundary effect” is costly to offset, requiring a cash transfer equivalent to half of household expenditure. While informational and social interventions don’t ameliorate this barrier, reliable group transportation helps. The importance of secure transport and additional results suggest the boundary effect may be partly due to safety concerns. A notable share of the boundary effect is explained by having to traverse underpopulated spaces, a proxy for threats to safety in this context. Our work provides experimental confirmation that access constraints faced by women are significant, costly to address monetarily, but can be ameliorated through locally attuned interventions.

Women’s Mobility and Labor Supply: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

In cities with conservative norms or high crime, female workers may face greater restrictions on their physical mobility. This limits women’s labor market opportunities and the pool of workers that firms can attract. In this study, we experimentally vary access to a transport service in Lahore, Pakistan, to quantify the overall impact of transport to work on men, women, and the differential impact of transport exclusively for women. We show that reducing physical mobility constraints has a large impact on job searching for women, including women who are not searching at baseline. Women’s response is driven by a women-only transport treatment arm, suggesting that safety and social acceptability, rather than simply cost, are key constraints.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Migrant Remittances in the Philippines

Money sent home by migrants working abroad is an important source of income, particularly in low and middle-income countries. In the Philippines, remittances represent ten percent of GDP, and about a quarter of Philippine households report receiving remittances. 1 With the outbreak of COVID-19 and its impact on the global economy, policymakers worried about the resilience of these important remittance flows. The lower-than-expected fall in remittances to low and middle income countries (-1.7% in 2020 versus -7.1% forecast)2 could be the result of a transition from informal to formal channels. Field studies are necessary to assess the correct dimension of the COVID shock. To investigate how pandemic closures and restrictions affect migrants’ income and remittances, researchers built on a previous study to conduct two rounds of phone surveys between Filipino migrants in the UAE and their families in the Philippines. A total of 1,188 migrants and 1,329 households participated in the first round of the survey, from September to November 2020. 1,081 migrants and 1,358 households participated in the second round, from March to May 2021.

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