Mercado laboral y sistema de protección social en Colombia: Desincentivos al trabajo y al progreso

Autor:

Jairo Núñez

Resumen: 

El presente artículo indaga sobre los posibles desincentivos al trabajo ocasionados por las fallas estructurales en el diseño de los actuales programas de protección social, como es el caso de Familias en Acción y del Régimen Subsidiado.Además identifica el círculo vicioso sobre el cual se mueve la economía colombiana, dado que estos programas de protección social mantienen una estructura económica improductiva, con altos niveles de pobreza. Para esto, se analiza el mercado laboral colombiano y se hace una comparación entre las situaciones de los trabajadores no calificados –tanto para el sector formal como informal–, evidenciando los fuertes incentivos generados por los programas al fenómeno de la informalidad. Los resultados de esta investigación derivan en recomendaciones de políticas públicas encaminadas a reducir dichos niveles de

pobreza y traspasar el umbral de subdesarrollo del país.

Palabras clave: Protección social, empleo, informalidad, pobreza, trabajo calificado.

Ver el documento completo haciendo  clic AQUÍ

Productivity and Household Investment in Health - The Case of Colombia

Authors:

Rocio Ribero
Jairo Nuñez

Summary: 

The purpose of this study is to understand how public and private investments in health in Colombia are related to future earnings of individuals. The returns to good health of individuals and the determinants of the health production function are analyzed. The magnitude of the returns to having good health status is identified through the direct effect of health variables on earnings of individuals. Regional (rural-urban) and gender aspects are considered separately. The significant IV estimates showed that one more day of disability decreased male rural earnings by 33% and female by 13%, that having a disability in a given month decreased the earnings of an urban male by 28% and by 14% for an urban female, and that having one more centimeter of stature increased urban female earnings by 6.9% and urban male earnings by 8%. These returns to height are larger than those found in some other countries and reveal that investments in nutrition may be as important as investments in education for future increases in productivity and growth. Estimations of health production functions showed that it would be desirable to increase social security coverage in rural areas in order to see a lower incidence or duration of illness in these regions. However, in urban areas, where the system of social security is more developed, social security may only increase the tendency to report illness. In general, wealthier individuals tend to have better health and the interaction between non-labor income of the individual and adequate housing affects positively the health status of individuals. Policies oriented to increase the coverage of basic services in households, such as electricity, potable water or sewage, have a negligible effect on height and, through height, on productivity. Policies oriented to provide more adequate housing translate into better health conditions and productivity for individuals.

Ver el  documento  completo haciendo  clic  AQUÍ

Quality of Life in Urban Neighborhoods in Colombia: The Cases of Bogotá and Medellín

Authors:

Carlos Medina

Leonardo Morales

Jairo Núñez

Abstract:

We use data from Bogotá and Medellín to describe key quality of life indicators of each city and illustrate their spatial segregation at the census sector level. We present evidence that the main two Colombian cities are highly spatially segregated. Household are spatially segregated according to their education levels and access to education, coverage of public services, households headed by women and key demographic variables like their levels of adolescent pregnancy. Social phenomena like crime, measured by the homicide rates at the census sector level, present as well clusters of higher incidence in these cities. Not surprisingly, our estimated quality of life indexes resemble the mentioned segregation patterns in each city. We present evidence that the spatial agglomeration is statistically significant for each of the variables enumerated. We estimate hedonic models of house values and life satisfaction for Bogotá and Medellín and find that the importance of the average level of education at the census sector level to determine house prices is striking. We also compare hedonic models for Bogotá and Medellín. Bogotá is better endowed than Medellín in the variables included in the analysis, in particular, it has higher education levels, and additionally, education is more equally distributed within census sectors. Bogotá has also better access to gas, and has in general houses with better conditions. The hedonic models based on house values and life satisfaction approaches used in this article lead to similar conclusions in the aggregate when comparing their implied quality of life indexes. Although each approach allows us to determine its specific determinants, and these are not always the same, implied by their aggregated indexes suggest that these factors are just different faces of the same story. From a policy perspective, the evidence suggests that redesigning the current socioeconomic stratification system in a way that still allows reaching the poorest while preventing segregation to deepen, might be the most important challenge to face in order to improve quality of life in main Colombian cities.

Ver el documento completo haciendo clic AQUÍ

Esfuerzos y herencias sociales en la desigualdad de ingresos en Colombia

Autores: 

Jairo Núñez
Juan Carlos Ramírez
Bibiana Taboada

Resumen:

Cuando la educación y los ingresos de los individuos dependen principalmente de características heredadas, la inequidad se perpetúa y la política social tiene menor espacio para corregirla. Este estudio se compone de dos partes. La primera presenta algunas mediciones de la movilidad social en Colombia, y la segunda simula una situación en la cual las personas tendrían las mismas oportunidades, si se igualan las características heredadas.

El estudio muestra que, si las personas tuvieran las mismas oportunidades al nacer (igualdad de  características heredadas), el nivel de desigualdad económica que prevalecería podría mejorar entre 12% y 28% (según los índices de Gini o de Theil, respectivamente), tanto para individuos como para los hogares. No obstante que esto mejoraría la situación de desigualdad en Colombia en el contexto latinoamericano y mundial, aún sería muy elevada para los estándares internacionales.

Los resultados indican que la desigualdad en la distribución del ingreso está asociada, principalmente, y más en el caso de hombres que de mujeres, con el nivel educativo de los padres. Esto implica que para evitar el ciclo generacional de reproducción de la desigualdad, se requiere de un esfuerzo intenso en materia educativa para las generaciones jóvenes. Otras condiciones como características étnicas, origen rural y región de residencia, también generan desigualdad en el contexto nacional, pero su influencia es menor y menos estable en el tiempo.

A pesar de la influencia de la educación en la desigualdad, resultan también importantes factores económicos y culturales, como el mercado de trabajo y la composición familiar. Por ello, si bien es cierto que el sistema educativo debe ser una prioridad de política, progresos en cobertura y calidad de la educación, deben acompañarse de otros programas de protección social que contribuyan a mejorar la composición de la unidad familiar, la independencia económica de los hogares, los ingresos alternativos al laboral y a disminuir su vulnerabilidad.

Ver el documento completo haciendo clic AQUÍ

Teenage Childbearing in Latin American Countries

Authors: 

Carmen Elisa Flórez

Jairo Núñez

Abstract:

In spite of the rapid fertility transition experienced by most Latin American and Caribbean countries, teenage fertility has not changed at the same pace or in the same direction. Given that early childbearing is deleterious for both mother and child, we describe differentials in the levels and trends in teenage childbearing and analyze its proximate and socioeconomic determinants.

We used Demographic and Health Surveys data from six LAC countries for which data are available for the second half of the 1990s: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Dominican Republic and Peru. Teenage fertility trends indicate different patterns of change across countries by area of residence. However, in most countries teenage fertility has increased in rural areas but declined or remained constant in urban areas. Different contributions of marriage, proper use of family planning methods, and premarital births to teenage fertility behavior are reflected in differentials in unmarried parenthood across countries. Socioeconomic determinants are analyzed through simple logit model, multilevel analysis, and continuous-time hazard rate models. These analyses improve on prior research on LAC countries by including contextual/regional factors, isolating the effects into differentials in sexual activity and rates of childbearing, and by comparing the socioeconomic determinants of the timing of first birth and premarital birth. This research demonstrates that the effect of socioeconomic variables on the rate of childbearing can act through the timing of initial sexual intercourse (such as education, socioeconomic conditions of the households and area or residence) or through the timing of first birth (such as socialization in a female-headed family, availability/acceptability/use of family planning, and regional/country conditions, such as cultural and inherent characteristics).

Ver el Documento completo  haciendo clic AQUÍ

The Cost of Avoiding Crime: The case of Bogotá

Authors: 

Alejandro Gaviria

Carlos Medina

Leonardo Morales

Jairo Núñez

Abstract:

Quantifying the costs of crime and violence is a useful exercise because 

it contributes to the quality of the public discussion about a fundamental 

problem, and because it helps policymakers both prioritize and design cost- 

effective policies to diminish the adverse effects of crime. Estimates of the 

cost of violence are usually based on health care expenditures and losses 

to national economies coming from (among other things) days away from 

work, law enforcement expenditures, and unrealized investments.

Nonetheless, these estimations do not usually consider the cost posed by 

crime and violence to households within cities, in terms of both the different 

risks they face and the coping mechanisms used by them. Specifi cally, within 

a city, the variation of crime and violence rates across neighborhoods provides 

a market that is serviced by security agencies created for that purpose. 

Households often end up paying for security in the form of higher property 

and rental values.

There are two relevant issues concerning the market for neighborhood 

afety (the amenity under consideration in this chapter) that one should 

consider. First, one must quantify the cost of this amenity to households. 

Second, one must identify the impossibility of most households to meet this 

cost. Even though many  households are willing to pay to avoid crime, just 

a few are actually able to, thus making neighborhood safety (a supposedly 

pure public good) subject to private markets, and therefore to exclusion.

In this chapter, we study the aforementioned issues for the city of Bogotá, 

Colombia. We fi nd that households living in the highest socioeconomic stratum 

(stratum 6) are paying up to 7.2 percent of their house values in order 

to prevent average homicide rates from increasing in one standard deviation. 

For their part, households in stratum 5 are paying up to 2.4 percent of 

their house values to prevent homicide rates from increasing. These results 

indicate the willingness to pay for security by households in Bogotá, and, 

additionally, show the emergence of urban private markets for security. 

These markets imply different levels of access to public goods among the 

population, and actually, the exclusion of the poorest.

We now proceed to describe the levels of crime in Colombia and some previous 

work on the topic. Then we describe our data and present the empirical 

methodology and identifi cation strategy. Finally, we present the results and 

offer some general conclusions.

Ver  documento completo  haciendo clic AQUÍ

The Impact of Public and Private Job Training in Colombia

Authors

Carlos Medina

Jairo Núñez

Abstract:

The authors present various matching estimators of the impact on earnings for individuals who attended public and private job training programs in Colombia. The authors estimate propensity scores by controlling for the wide variety of personal and socioeconomic background variables of those individuals. The effect of training, measured by the mean impact of the treatment on the treated, shows that: (i) for youths, no institution has a significant impact in the short or long run except private institutions for males; the scope of the data, however, limits the reliability of the result; (ii) for adult males, neither SENA nor the other public institutions have a significant impact in the short or long run; (iii) for SENAtrained adult females there are positive but not significant impacts in the short run and greater and close to significant effects in the long run. All other public institutions have a higher impact that is significant in the long-run; (iv) for adults trained at private institutions there are large and significant effects in both theshort and long run, but for adult males in the short run the effects are smaller and only barely significant. In addition, neither short nor long courses provided by SENA seem to have a significant impact on earnings. In general, females benefit more from both short and long courses than males. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis shows that under the assumption of direct unitary costs equal to SENA, private institutions are more profitable than public institutions, which are in turn more profitable than SENA.

Ver  el documento completo haciendo  clic AQUÍ

The Reversal of Inequality Trends in Colombia, 1978-1995: A Combination of Persistent and Fluctuating Forces

Autores: 

Carlos Eduardo Vélez

Jose Leibovich

Adriana Kugler

Cesar Bouillón 

Jairo Núñez

Abstract

Between 1978 and 1995, Colombia made a U-turn in income inequality and underwent significantchanges in key socio-demographic characteristics and labor market indicators. The dynamics of inequality were asymmetric: while rural inequality improved, the opposite happened in urban areas with predominant effects on national income distribution. In this paper we measure the specific contributions of determinant factors of household income to the dynamics of urban and rural inequality for the periods 1978-88 and 1988-95. Using a microeconomic reduced form model of individual labor earnings and labor market participation and occupational choice, we decompose the changes in inequality derived from variations in (i) the returns to human assets -education and experience- and the residual variance; (ii) the changes in endowments of human assets –schooling- and in family size; and (iii) the structural changes in labor force participation and occupational choice. Our findings show that periods of moderate inequality changes conceal strong counterbalancing effects of equalizing and unequalizing forces. The dynamics of income inequality in Colombia might be decomposed as a combination of persistent and fluctuating forces. In urban areas the four persistent factors are jointly unequalizing: education endowment equalization, family size, non-labor income and participation and occupational choice –at the individual level-.

However, the larger and unstable effects of five other fluctuating factors dominate them –e.g. returns to education-. Paradoxically, education endowment equalization worsens income inequality in urban areas but improves it in rural areas. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the large differences in returns to education prevalent in the urban areas. It is also surprising that increasing participation of less skilled women generated asymmetric effects between household and individual wage distributions. Although households appear to exacerbate static inequality among workers, they also attenuate the changes in individual income inequality produced by each determinant factor. Finally, unless the increasing trend of skill wage differentials is reversed, the aggregate effect of persistent inequality determinants leads to expect an increasing deterioration of long run inequality trends.

Ver el documento completo haciendo clic AQUÍ

Propuesta para el diseño de un sistema de protección social en Colombia

Autores: 

Jairo Núñez

Laura Cuesta

Resumen: 

Pese a los esfuerzos realizados en los últimos años, en Colombia aún no se constituye un Sistema de Protección Social (SPS) que cumpla sus funciones primordiales: proveer asistencia social a los pobres, asegurar a la población contra choques y proteger a los pobres extremos de los efectos de las crisis económicas y los desastres naturales. Si bien existen mecanismos para cubrir algunos riesgos, parte de la población, en especial la del sector informal, continúa por fuera del Sistema. Esto en parte se debe a que el diseño actual copia formas de aseguramiento de los países desarrollados, donde la mayoría de los ocupadosn tienen un empleo formal. Por su parte, la función Robin Hood de la protección social no se está cumpliendo. En términos generales, hay una serie de programas con coberturas muy bajas, ineficiencia en la focalización, altos costos administrativos, y posibilidades muy bajas de tener economías de escala. Además, la coordinación entre las diversas entidades y niveles gubernamentales es deficiente, en particular, la coordinación con los gobiernos locales. Por último, bajo el esquema actual, no existe un mecanismo para proteger a los más pobres de los efectos de choques covariados. Este estudio presenta una propuesta para

constituir un SPS para Colombia que tiene en cuenta las características del mercado laboral colombiano, los problemas de incentivos y las fallas de mercado.

Palabras clave: protección social, mercado laboral, seguridad social, asistencia social, protección a la niñez, educación, vivienda, red de protección social.

Ver el  documento completo haciendo clic AQUÍ

Pro-poor growth and pro-poor programs in Colombia

Jairo Núñez

Silvia Espinosa

Abstract:

This paper analyzes the relationship between growth, poverty and income distribution using household data for Colombia for the years 1996 to 2004. We study the relationship between growth, inequality and poverty by following the Poverty Equivalent Growth Rate (PEGR) methodology developed by Kakwani and Khandker, which considers both the magnitude of growth and the degree to which the poor benefit from the growth process. We also carry out a decomposition of the changes in poverty to better understand the effects of growth, distribution and migration on poverty. Once we have explored pro-poor growth, we move on to study the pro-poorness of Colombia’s main social programs using Kakwani and Son’s “Pro-Poor Policy” index. The results show that growth in Colombia has generally been anti-poor, a consequence of high inequality in the urban sector and of low growth rates in the rural sector. Moreover, more than half of Colombia’s social programs are also anti-poor, benefiting the non-poor to a larger extent than the poor.

Ver el documento  completo  haciendo clic AQUÍ