Wage differentials between public and private sector workers and income inequality in Brazil

Two of my brightest colleagues, Pedro Souza and Marcelo Medeiros, have recently published a study on 'The contribution of wage differentials between public and private sector workers to the overall household income inequality in Brazil'.

The paper is published in Portuguese only  the title translation is my bad  but you may read the abstract:

We estimate the contribution of the wage differential between workers with the same attributes in the public and private sectors to the household per capita income inequality in Brazil. The estimate is based on counterfactual simulations and the contribution to inequality on a factor decomposition of the Gini coefficient. Data comes from the Brazilian National Household Survey PNAD 2009. The differential corresponds approximately to 17% of the wage bill of workers in the public sector, is regressive and highly concentrated. However, because it amounts to a small share of the total income (1%) its contribution to the total inequality is of 3%. The sector composition effects on inequality are times higher than the segmentation (price) effects. These conclusions are robust to changes in the definition of the sectors and to different estimation techniques.

Assorted Links

1. An awesome aerial view of Hong Kong
   
   
2. An optimistic take on Brazil Housing Policy (and a different opinion)
   
   
3. University applications in the UK: what subjects are people applying for?
   
   
4. Mapping Twitter in African cities
   
   
5. Transportation and Demographics trends from the 2010 US Census (via Data Insights Blog)
   
   
6. 'U.S. Unemployment Rate,' By Andy Warhol (via Drunkeynesian)
   
   
7. Special Logistics Challenges Posed by Mega-Cities in Emerging Markets
   
   
8. Urban Playground - Buenos Aires (via Urban Tick)

Urban Picture

Evolution of  the New York Skyline (1876 - 2013)

(via @Demografia_CSIC)

[Click on the image to enlarge it]

[Image Credit: Retronaut]

Soundtrack: a duet of Miles Davis and LCD Soundsystem

Chart of the Day

The Education Gap in american metropolitan areas 

(by Alan Berube and Jonathan Rothwell - Brookings)

The Social Network Effect Behind Obesity

This is a nice talk by Nicholas Christakis on Sociology and Social Networks. It is very concise and well presented covering a quite broad range of topics such as suicide, social capital, collective behavior and social networks.

What attracted my attention though was the part on the Social Network Effect Behind Obesity, where Christakis talks about this paper he and James H. Fowler have published in The New England Journal of Medicine (in the video, skip to 19:06). Quite impressive!

The unintended consequence of licence plate schemes

A couple of cities such as São Paulo, Bogota and Mexico City have already tried to cut down on traffic using licence plate schemes. Needless to say they have achieved limited success  if any .

In this Freakonomics episode Dubner and Levitt talk about the universal law of 'unintended consequence' and how it applies to such schemes.

Assorted Links

1. 26th ERSA Summer School (ht Leo Monasterio)
   
   
2. Why Has Competition to Get into Top Colleges Become Much Tougher?
   
   
3. Good tuff question
   
   
4. 11 planned cities as seen from space (HT Joao Meirelles)
   
   
5. "Why don't you come over?", a campaign by gandul.info in response to the British one called "Don't come to England"
   
   
6. U.S. overlaid on the Moon for a sense of scale
   
   
7. A 52-meter tall tribute to Oscar Niemeyer in SP
   
   
8. The state of China cities 2012/2013
   
   
9. Worldwide Twitter Activity in Real Time (via infosthetics)

Is there a demographic divide between rich and poor countries ?

Here is a presentation by Hans Rosling (aka the “Mick Jagger” of TED) breaking down the myth of demographic divide between rich and poor countries.

(via Colin Marshall)

No wonder why we never get tired of watching. 

Message of the Day

(via tudo ao mesmo tempo agora)

Demographic Cliff

The issue of World Population Bomb is gradually losing ground to other issues such as imploding national populations and aging workforce.

Of course we always find those who sounds extremely pessimistic. Jim Russell (Burgh Diaspora blog), for example, points out to several declining places (low fertility and no migration attraction). According to him, Southern New England Is Dying, Puerto Rico Is Dying, China Is Dying, Germany Is Dying, America Is Dying, Sun Belt Counties Dying, Silicon Valley Is Dying, New York City Is Dying, London Is Dying, San Francisco Is Dying etc etc  ok. We understood, we're all dying anyway 

The McKinsey Global Institute has published a report on how aging populations will reduce global savings (15min audio summary). Other pessimist, Jonathan Last (author of 'What To Expect When No One's Expecting'), trumpets a coming demographic disaster:

"Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate." 

The fact is no one is actually optimistic about current demographic trends. Nancy Folbre (MIT) has a more moderate opinion, although still far from being optimistic.

This post is getting too long for my  time constraint  standards, so I'll end it with this chart by Simon Hedlin and a coulpe of related links.

[Image Credit: Simon Hedlin]

 Related Links:

• Working-age shift in Europe
• Labor productivity vs Demographics
• Will China’s demographic shift force a fall in investment share?
• Addressing China's looming talent shortage
• Assorted Links on Workforce and Education
• Skills deficit holds India back