Abstract

Limited access to safe transportation is one of the greatest challenges to labor force participation faced by women in developing countries. This paper quantifies the causal impacts of improved urban transport systems in women’s employment outcomes, looking at Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and elevated light rail investments in the metropolitan region of Lima, Peru. We find large gains in employment and earnings per hour among women, and not for men, due to these investments. Most of the gains arise on the extensive margin, with more women being employed, but employment does not appear to be of higher quality than that for comparison groups. We find also evidence of an increase in the use of public transport. Results are robust to alternative specifications and we do not find evidence that they are driven by neighborhood composition changes or reorganization of economic activity. Overall, these findings suggest that infrastructure investments that make it faster and safer for women to use public transport can generate important labor market impacts for women who reside in the area of influence of the improved infrastructure.

Abstract

A prerequisite for sustainable economic growth
Russian economy is to increase the efficiency of enterprises. One of
factors that can lead to this is the expansion of Russia's involvement in
international trade. The most obvious are the consequences of the effects,
related to the growth in the number of more efficient exporting companies as a result of
increased international specialization. Enterprises with a positive export
status, as a rule, are larger, therefore, with an increase in the level of involvement
countries in international trade, production resources flow towards more
productive exporting companies, which leads to an increase in the overall level
economic efficiency. At the same time, under the hypothesis of learning through
exports, the entry of new companies into export markets will lead to an increase in their
efficiency, and hence the growth of the efficiency of the Russian economy as a whole.
Thus, economic growth can be associated with three regularities: firstly,
the number of exporting firms increases, and secondly, at the beginning of the export
activities, according to the assumption of learning through export activity,
firms that have entered the foreign market become more efficient, thirdly,
exporting enterprises are becoming larger, which leads to the spillover of factors
production to more efficient firms with a positive export status.
This paper explores the hypothesis of learning through exports. A task
is complicated by the fact that direct measurement leads to system errors. Exit to
foreign markets is associated with overcoming barriers, which leads to additional
costs for businesses. Benefit from this kind of activity can only
firms are initially more productive, which corresponds to the selection effect.
It turns out that in a simple comparison of firms with different export status,
exporters will be more efficient, but it will be impossible to say what
share of the effect of learning through export in this difference.