Three Essays on Economic Structure, Employment and Development

The first essay of this dissertation uses accounting methods to decompose aggregate labour productivity and employment growth into their sectoral components as well as into within-sector and employment reallocation effects for a sample of 81 developed and developing countries using data going back to the mid-1980s. Key findings are that aggregate labour productivity growth for developing countries taken together is driven by as much services as by industry, in spite of strong differences between countries, and that within-sector effects on aggregate labour productivity growth are more important than employment reallocation effects, a pattern that holds for all regions.The second essay uses data from Stats SA's 2007 Community Survey to test the theory of feminization U in South Africa, exploiting the diversity in economic structure across municipalities. Results show a U-shape relationship between the probability that a woman will be in the labor force and the level of industrialization in the municipality in which a woman lives. The second part of this essay investigates women's ability or inability to combine paid and unpaid work using data from South Africa's 2000 Time Use Survey. The results show that certain types of employment, namely small-scale agriculture and informal employment, are associated with doing more paid and unpaid work simultaneously than employment in formal industry or formal services allows.They third essay explores the multi-dimensional aspects of job quality among the self-employed in low-income communities surrounding Cape Town, South Africa. The objective is to determine if expanding the analysis of job quality to include context, social relations and power changes our understanding of employment experiences among the self-employed. The investigation involved conducting in-depth interviews with 24 small business owners in three different communities surrounding Cape Town: Langa, Khayelitsha, and Strand. The paper reveals that self-employment for the poor cannot be seen as wholly positive or wholly negative: there are both challenges and benefits of being self-employed. While the employment experiences among the interview sample are heterogeneous, certain challenges such as demand constraints and benefits such as work being a means of building social relationships are found for the majority of the sample.