Conference Agenda

Faced with significant socioeconomic challenges, high unemployment, high poverty rates, and slow economic growth, sub-Saharan Africa remains vulnerable to climate change. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of climate shocks on youth, agricultural, industrial and service employment. For this purpose, we use a difference in difference methodology to estimate the effects on panel data. We found that rising temperatures lead to losses in youth and agricultural employment. The most affected jobs are in countries with weak labor market regulation. We also found that as a consequence of high temperatures, a reallocation of labor from the agricultural sector to the industrial and service sectors. Similarly, we have observed that drought is the cause of significant agricultural and industrial employment job losses. These results demonstrate that adverse weather events are a real threat to jobs. These findings call on African governments to invest in mitigation and adaptation measures to address the multiple employment challenges.

There is a growing interest in decoupling economic growth from further resource use. One aspect of addressing the negative impacts on the environment is through a labor market instrument, namely working time. Although research on working time and environmental developments have evolved independently from each other, there has been a recent interest to look at these issues jointly, which is also the objective of this paper. In particular, this paper will investigate and quantify the empirical relationship between working time and environmental indicators across the EU countries.

Specifically, the paper uses a reformulation of the IPAT model based on Ehrlich and Holdren (1971) and Dietz and Rosa (1994) to estimate the environmental impact of a multiplication of factors such as population, affluence (e.g. economic growth or prosperity) and technological advancement. The reformulation allows to express environmental impacts (e.g. measured as CO2 emissions or ecological footprint) in terms of working hours and a number of other elements that could be relatively easily measured across countries. Compared to similar papers in the related literature, the current paper increases the country and period coverage and proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to include a sectoral perspective additionally.

The paper uses state-of-the-art econometric methods to estimate the impact of working hours on the environment taking into account a number of country-specific control variables within the theoretical framework. The estimated models include aggregate variables such as GDP, population, the share of employed individuals, annual working hours as well as a number of environmental impact indicators such as CO2 emissions, carbon or ecological footprint. The cross-country data is taken from publicly available sources such as Penn World Tables, the World Bank and Eurostat’s environmental statistics. The paper covers the period from 1950 until 2021 (depending on the availability of the dependent variable, this period can decrease to cover 1960-2015) and the EU countries as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK.

The preliminary results confirm that there is a positive relationship between working hours and environmental pressures across the countries in the EU. In other words, more working hours lead to increased CO2 emissions and carbon footprint ceteris paribus. This might be suggestive of a scenario in which working time reduction, in addition to its positive association with improved well-being and work-life balance, could also be a way to decrease the environmental impacts and potentially slow down a major driver of climate change.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic crises have hamstrung many of the world’s lower-income and smaller economies, bringing along with it an increase in food insecurity among some of the most vulnerable. Financing this recovery will depend in part on the ability of many developing countries to mobilize resources from external sources. Remittances — a proportion of earnings from citizens working abroad and sent home to families — remain a crucial source of foreign financing for countries in Latin America and Caribbean and have served as an important buffer in helping families cope during crises such as those related to the pandemic. Remittances play a key role in meeting the target set forth in goal 10 of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, food security remains a serious concern for these countries where high inflation, amongst other things, have ensured that rising food prices continue to make food less affordable. This study evaluates the impact of workers’ remittances on food insecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean. The paper uses data from a Coronavirus survey of households covering over 200,000 individuals in Latin America and the Caribbean during an intense period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Preliminary estimates from OLS regressions suggest that remittances from abroad are associated with about 1.5 percent points (9.3 percent) decrease in food insecurity. We find heterogeneous effects across gender and region. The impact of remittances is most evident amongst females and individuals residing in Latin America. Our results also reveal that remittances from the USA have a stronger impact on reducing food insecurity than remittances from other parts of the world. Overall, our results are also robust to alternative specifications, such as propensity score matching. This research adds to the small body of literature on the effect of remittances on food insecurity and is consistent with the findings of these studies.

This study explores policy narratives in the case of the repatriation policy of Indonesian Migrant Workers (IMW) using a content analysis and semi-structured interview approach. This research aims to address the challenges and fill the gaps from previous study by providing insight into the dynamics that arose in the return phase of the IMW during the Covid-19 pandemic. The mass return of the migrant workers during the pandemic had the potential to increase the spread of the virus and unemployment in Indonesia, which was supposed to be anticipated by the Government. A content analysis was then conducted to show the public's reactions and opinions on the repatriation of migrant workers during the Covid-19 pandemic in the last four years (2020–2023) through social media, including public conversations about the efforts and policies of the Indonesian government in repatriating the workers. Data was collected by scraping conversations from Twitter using the Twitter Streaming Application Programming Interface (API) and a Python package called Tweepy. Subsequently, semi-structured interviews were conducted by asking questions to several stakeholders who were involved or had an influence in the repatriation to examine the direction of the repatriation policy during the pandemic.

The results of the Twitter analysis show that the public had various opinions about the repatriation of IMW during the pandemic, and that each of these opinions was correlated with the Indonesian Government's policy. Public opinions that emerged ranged from fear of increased Covid-19 spread to potential other impacts generated by the policy. On the other hand, there was a group of people who were worried about the condition of IMW remaining abroad, particularly in places like Wuhan, which was where the virus originated. The results of the semi-structured interviews revealed several issues that arose during the efforts to repatriate IMW, including the challenges posed by undocumented workers and the use of quarantine sites to reduce the likelihood of Covid-19 transmission. An informant from the government sector also stated that public opinions influenced the government's actions and policies regarding the repatriation of migrant workers during the pandemic; in some cases, public conversations on social media also provided information to the government. Research findings have strengthened the theory that discusses policy networks, where advocacy coalitions and integrated vertical government are the most important elements in supporting the success of policy formulation.