DOCUMENT DE TRAVAIL DT/2009-07 Decomposing Gender and Ethnic Earnings Gaps in Seven West African Cities Christophe NORDMAN Anne-Sophie ROBILLIARD François ROUBAUD DIAL • 4, rue d’Enghien • 75010 Paris • Téléphone (33) 01 53 24 14 50 • Fax (33) 01 53 24 14 51 E-mail :
[email protected] • Site : www.dial.prd.fr DECOMPOSING GENDER AND ETHNIC EARNINGS GAPS IN SEVEN WEST AFRICAN CITIES Christophe Nordman Anne Sophie Robilliard François Roubaud IRD, DIAL, Paris IRD, DIAL, Dakar IRD, DIAL, Hanoï
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Document de travail DIAL Octobre 2009 Abstract In this paper, we analyse the size and determinants of gender and ethnic earnings gaps in seven West African capitals (Abidjan, Bamako, Cotonou, Dakar, Lome, Niamey and Ouagadougou) based on a unique and perfectly comparable dataset coming from the 1-2-3 Surveys conducted in the seven cities from 2001 to 2002. Analysing gender and ethnic earnings gaps in an African context raises a number of important issues that our paper attempts to address, notably by taking into account labour allocation between public, private formal and informal sectors which can be expected to contribute to earnings gaps. Our results show that gender earnings gaps are large in all the cities of our sample and that gender differences in the distribution of characteristics usually explain less than half of the raw gender gap. By contrast, majority ethnic groups do not appear to have a systematic favourable position in the urban labour markets of our sample of countries and observed ethnic gaps are small relative to gender gaps.