How the 1978 changes to the foreign domestic workers law in Singapore increased the female labour supply

Freire, Tiago (2013): How the 1978 changes to the foreign domestic workers law in Singapore increased the female labour supply.

Abstract

In 1978, Singapore was the first country to introduce legislation allowing foreign domestic workers (e.g. maids) to work in the country with special visas. Singapore, with its liberal wage policy (no minimum wage), is also the best quasi-natural experiment in determining how a reduction in the cost of domestic work increases the supply of highly skilled female workers. Though Singapore is often cited in the literature as a success story, there are no studies that try to quantify the impact of this legislation. In this paper, we use data from the census conducted between 1957 and 1990, and Singapore's Yearbook of Manpower Statistics between 1974 and 1985, to evaluate the impact of the 1978 legislation in terms of increasing the labour supply of Singaporean women. We compare the female labour supply before and after 1978, for young and older women, high and low-skilled women, and Singaporean-Malay versus Singaporean-Chinese women. We find that the labour supply of women affected by this policy increased by between 2.7% and 12.7%, consistent with previous findings.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Gender; Labour Supply; Quasi-Natural Experiment; Singapore
• Subjects: J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J1 - Demographic Economics > J16 - Economics of Gender ; Non-labor Discrimination; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor > J21 - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers > J61 - Geographic Labor Mobility ; Immigrant Workers

References

Bertrand, Marianne, Duflo, Esther, & Mullainathan, Sendhil. 2004. How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119(1), 249–275.

Blundell, Richard, MaCurdy, Thomas, & Meghir, Costas. 2007. Handbook of Economet- rics. 1st edn. Vol. 6. Elsivier Science B.V. Chap. Labor Supply Models: Unobserved Heterogeneity, Nonparticipation and Dynamics, pages 4667–4775.

Cortes, Patricia, & Pan, Jessica. Forthcoming. Outsourcing Household Production: The Demand for Foreign Domestic Helpers and Native Labor Supply in Hong Kong. Journal of Labor Economics, November. mimeo.

Cortes, Patricia, & Tessada, Jose. 2011. Low-Skilled Immigration and the Labor Supply of Highly Skilled Women. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 3(3), 88–123. University of Chicago.

Donald, Stephen, & Lang, Kevin. 2007. Inference with Difference-in-Differences and Other Panel Data. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 89(2), 221–233.

Freire, Tiago. 2010. Maids and School Teachers: Low Skill Migration and High Skill Labour Supply. mimeo.

Furtado, Delia, & Hock, Heinrich. 2010. Low Skilled Immigration and Work-Fertility Tradeoffs among High Skilled US Natives. American Economic Review, 100(2), 224–28.

Hansen, Bruce E. 2007. Leats Squares Model Averaging. Econometrica, 75(4), 1175–1189.

Hui, Weng Tat. 1997. Regionalization, economic restructuring and labor migration in Singapore. International Migration, 35(1), 109–130.

Khananusapkul, Phanwadee. 2004 (May). Do low-skilled female immigrants increase the labor supply of skilled native women? Harvard University Thesis. Harvard University.

Killingsworth, Mark, & Heckman, James J. 1995. Handbook of Labor Economics. Elsevier. Chap. 2 Female labor supply: A survey, pages 103–204.

Kim, Wong Wee. 2011. Population Trends. Tech. rept. Singapore Department of Statistics.

Kremer, Michael, & Watt, Stanley. 2005 (October). The Globalization of Household Pro- duction. Working Paper. Harvard University.

Lee, Edwin. 2008. Singapore: The Unexpected Nation. In: Gungwu, Wang (ed), History of Nation-Building Series. Singapore: Institute of South-East Asian Studies.

MaCurdy, Thomas. 1981. An Empirical Model of Labor Supply in a Life-Cycle Setting. Journal of Political Economy, 89(6), 1059–1085.

Neuhaus, John M., & Jewell, Nicholas P. 1993. A Geometric Approach to Assess Bias Due to Omited Covariates in Generalized Linear Models. Biometrika, 80, 807815.

of Singapore, Government. 2012 (October). Foreign Worker Numbers. Online.

Oishi, Nana. 2005. Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies, and Labor Migration in Asia? 1st edition edn. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Wooldridge, Jeff. 2007 (Summer). Whats New in Econometrics? Lecture 10: Difference- in-Differences Estimation. Online.

Yap, Mui Teng. 2003. Fertility and Population Policy: The Singapore Experience. Journal od Population and Social Security (Population), Supplement to Volume 1, 643–658.

Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Huang, Shirlena, & III, Joaquin Gonzalez. 1999. Migrant Female Domestic Workers: Debating the Economic, Social and Political Impacts in Singapore. International Migration Review, 33(1), 114–136.