Abstract

POY, Santiago. Changes in Households’ Labour Participation and Economic Welfare: Argentina during Post-Reforms Years (2003-2014). Estud. trab. [online]. 2016, n.51. ISSN 0327-5744.

After 2001’s crisis, a fast recovery of labour market took place. Whereas different scholars have been focused in the individual workforce level, a less attended aspect has been the way in which those changes affected households. This article tackles changes in households’ labour participation and in economic welfare. Specifically, labour opportunities both for the household’s head and for secondary workers are analyzed, as well as the effects of these changes upon economic welfare in different groups of households. Also, the existence and evolution of a group of households that ‘concentrate’ low-productivity or precarious employment is tackled. The paper follows a quantitative strategy and data comes from Permanent Household Survey (INDEC). The general hypothesis is that persistent structural heterogeneity of the occupational system that has been verified by the literature at an individual level implies a segmented labour ‘opportunities structure’ for households which results in persistent inequalities in terms of economic welfare. Results show some opposed trends: a recovery of households that participate in the formal sector through their occupied members; the existence of persistent difficulties in terms of access to formal employment for those secondary workers whose head of household is in the informal sector or has a precarious employment, and a strong correlation between the belonging to the informal sector and poverty.

Keywords : Structural Heterogeneity; Informality; Economic Welfare; Poverty.