Urban Labor Market Revisited: Why Quality of Employment Matters in Bogota

Abstract

The urban labor market in Latin America has been assessed through a set of traditional typologies: formal-informal and wage labor-self-employed. In recent decades these approaches seem extensively criticized and overstretched by the successive waves of deregulation, incapable of analyzing the mutation of social practices. In this context, the quality of employment concept (QoE) appears as a multidimensional instrument that can break these representations. In this paper we offer an adapted methodology to construct a QoE index with the MCA method. This indicator shows its relevance by demonstrating that quality is not necessarily where you would expect on the Bogota’s urban labor market in 2013. Indeed, more than 25% and 41% of very low quality jobs are respectively formal and employees, and some social differences appear between workers in the different levels of QoE.

Keywords: Latin America, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, Quality of employment index, Univariate clustering, Urban labor market

JEL Classification: J21, J24, O17, O54