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" Essays on health and labor supply in developing countries "
Douglas Marshall McKee
M. T. Buchinsky, Duncan
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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52809
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| Doc. No
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TL22763
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| Call number
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3251463
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| Main Entry
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Douglas Marshall McKee
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| Title & Author
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Essays on health and labor supply in developing countries\ Douglas Marshall McKee
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| College
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University of California, Los Angeles
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| Date
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2006
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2006
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| Page No
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95
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| Abstract
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This dissertation is comprised of two chapters that examine labor supply and health in the developing world. The first chapter focuses on the labor supply of older people in Indonesia. In developed countries, most workers depend on public and private pension systems to smooth their consumption. In the developing world, where little formal institutional support exists, older individuals rely on their own labor income and on family support in the form of transfer payments, coresidence, and participation in family businesses. However, the dramatic gains in life expectancy and declines in family size and coresidence that accompany development suggest that these traditional forms of support may break down. In this chapter I build and estimate a structural dynamic model of labor supply for older men in Indonesia that incorporates these mechanisms. I use this model to simulate the effects of demographic change and a broad public pension reform on labor supply and welfare. The estimation results show that families and health play a key role in labor supply choices in old age. Simulations show that a unified defined-contribution pension program for government and private sector workers would provide modest welfare gains at a reasonable cost, but may not offset the potential welfare losses brought by declines in family support. These results highlight the complexities of old age labor supply and pension reform in the context of rapidly developing societies. In the second chapter, co-authored with Elizabeth Frankenberg and Duncan Thomas, we combine data from a population-based longitudinal survey with satellite measures of aerosol levels to assess the impact on adult health of smoke from forest fires that blanketed the Indonesian islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra in late 1997. To account for unobserved differences between haze and nonhaze areas, we compare changes in the health of individual respondents. Between 1993 and 1997, individuals who were exposed to haze experienced greater increases in difficulty with activities of daily living than did their counterparts in nonhaze areas. The results for respiratory and general health, although more complicated to interpret, suggest that haze had a negative impact on these dimensions of health.
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Social sciences; Aging; Developing countries; Health; Indonesia; Labor supply; Retirement; Gerontology; Labor economics; 0351:Gerontology; 0510:Labor economics
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M. T. Buchinsky, Duncan
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University of California, Los Angeles
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