Male and Female Earnings in the Caribbean Economy of Barbados: A Human Capital Perspective

The Determinants of Gender Differences in Income in Trinidad and Tobago

“…Women's slightly higher returns to education very likely reflect their poorer labour market options with low levels of education. Data from many other developing countries tend to yield outcomes not very dissimilar from those obtained here [Schultz, 1995;Psacharopoulos and Tzannatos, 1992a;Coppin, 1996]. Data from developed countries also tend to yield returns generally similar to the returns presented here.…”

“…The unadjusted male-female income differential found in the 1993 Trinidad and Tobago labour market compares favourably, at 19 per cent, with a differential of 15 per cent for Barbados in 1994 [Coppin, 1996], but is significantly lower than the differential of 73 per cent obtained for Jamaica with 1989 data [Scott, 1992]. However, the differential from Trinidad and Tobago reported in this study is much closer to the Jamaican differential using 1988 data of 25 per cent [Hotchkiss and Moore, 1996].…”

“…They attributed the differences in outcomes across these two studies to the different data sources, which yielded dissimilar measures of the various variables employed in the analyses. 2 Beyond the foregoing analyses for Jamaica, there is one other study -for Barbados -focusing on gender differences in earnings in an Anglophone Caribbean labour market [Coppin, 1996]. Employing data for 1994, that study revealed an average male-female earnings ratio of 115 per centsignificantly lower than that obtained for Jamaica by Scott [1992] but comparable to that obtained by Hotchkiss and Moore [1996].…”

Gender Earnings Gaps in the Caribbean: Evidence from Barbados and Jamaica

“…While the empirical literature on gender wage gaps is copious (see Weichselbaumer and Winter-Ebmer, 2005;Blau and Kahn, 2003), only a limited number of studies have examined this theme for Caribbean countries. 1 In a few studies (Scott, 1992;Terrell, 1992;Hotchkiss and Moore, 1996;Coppin, 1996;Olsen and Coppin, 2001;Sookram and Watson, 2008) gender issues in labor markets are investigated for Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Scott (1992) finds women earnings are on average 58 percent of the earnings of men in the Jamaican labor market.…”

“…Notwithstanding, the discrepancy in the magnitude of the gender wage gap, both Scott (1992) and Hotchkiss and Moore (1996) finds the bulk of the gender wage differential is unexplained by differences in individual characteristics. Coppin (1996) investigates the gender wage gap for Barbados using the 1994 Continuous Household Sample Survey (CHSS) and finds female-male earnings ratio of 87 percent. 2 Olsen and Coppin (2001) utilize the 1993 Continuous Sample Survey of the Population (CSSP) to estimate the gender wage gap for Trinidad and Tobago.…”