Low workforce participation of educated female and the role of work organizations in post-war Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka as a developing economy that achieved gender equity in education and a higher literacy rate (both adult and youth) in the South Asian region still records a low labor force participation and high unemployment rate of females when compared to their male counterparts. With the suggestion of existing literature on the non-conventional models of careers those adopted by young and female populations at the working age, this paper discusses the role of work organizations in absorbing more females (and even minority groups) into the workforce. It mainly focuses on the need of designing appropriate human resource strategies and reforming the existing organizational structures in order for contributing to the national development in the post-war Sri Lanka economy.

Is there any premium for unobservable quality? : a hedonic price analysis of the Malagasy rice market

This paper examines if consumers pay a premium for unobservable quality in the absence of quality standards and/or quality grading systems and, if so, how they assess that unobservable quality, using a rice retail market in Madagascar as an example. In Madagascar, the lack of quality standards and/or grading systems for rice makes is considered to be one of the causes of the rice market's spatial disintegration. Thus, quality standards and grading systems will be necessary to increase the market's efficiency. We hypothesize that consumers and retailers use product origin and rice name as observable indictors of unobservable quality and test the hypothesis using hedonic price regressions. We find that the interaction terms of product origin and rice name significantly affect the price after controlling for both observable quality and spatial and temporal price variation, but that the contribution of product origin and rice name to rice price variation is smaller than spatial and temporal factors. We thus conclude that consumers pay a premium for unobservable quality throughout Madagascar. This finding implies that quality standards and/or grading systems will work in the Malagasy market and that improving market infrastructure such as roads and storage will make them even more effective.

Labour market turnovers among South African youths

We describe the labour market turnovers of young people using a household survey data collected from Cape Town industrial area. We measure the correlates of first unemployment duration out of school and find that matriculation and late cohort (leaving school after 2007) are related with reduced initial unemployment, yet matriculation impacts are reduced among late cohort relative to early cohort. Our estimation reveals that initial unemployment is not related with subsequent employment duration nor wage rates, but related with number of turnovers which suggests that a shorter spell is associated with more stable job tenure.