Background:
Despite rising awareness of the importance of the agrifood sector, global measures of factor employment, labor employment and job quality are currently not available. This project aims to develop a comprehensive set of measures to feed into public debates about the importance of the agrifood sector and particularly its contribution to generation of high-quality jobs, particularly for women.
Scope of work
This project will involve extraction of data from the GTAP database, which is available in Gempack *.har format or GAMS *.gdx format, and their manipulation using matrix algebra to generate statistics on employment and job quality. Statistics are to be calculated for all GTAP regions and for summary regions as required. Software should be developed and provided to IFPRI for updating the employment and job quality database with future versions of the GTAP dataset.
The initial calculations will use the GTAP 10 or 11 database for most of the data and the World Bank GDLD database (https://datatopics.worldbank.org/gdld/ data available in Excel) for employment and wages by skill level and gender.
The agrifood sector will consist of the GTAP sectors for (1) Primary Agriculture, (2) Agro-Processing (including beverages and tobacco), and (3) Food Services. Supplementary calculations to split the sectors producing manufactures using agrifood inputs into agrifood componentsโsuch as cotton textiles/clothingโand non-agrifood components should also be undertaken.
The composite sector for Accommodation, Food and service activities needs to be split into a portion associated with food services and the remainder. This requires use of software packages that can maintain a balanced input-output table.
The part of the Trade and Transport sectors associated with marketing of agrifood products needs to be split from the output of these sectors using information on margins from sources external to the GTAP dataset. These then need to be added to the input structure of the agrifood sector.
Two measures of factor returns in the Agrifood sector need to be prepared. The first is based on direct resource use in the Agrifood sectors defined above. The second is based on the resources employedโin whatever sectorโneeded to produce the vector of final outputs from the Agrifood sectors. The first measures involve only summation of value added across sectors. The methodology for the second set of measures requires matrix algebra and is outlined in the Appendix. Both measures will include estimates of both the number of jobs and the quality of those jobs.
Required qualifications of the consultant
The consultant to undertake this task needs familiarity with the GTAP global database; with the procedures used to generate this database and with the source data used for this database. The consultant also needs the ability to transform these data, to introduce additional information either from GTAP source data or other sources, and to generate new estimates of employment and job quality in the agrifood sector.
Preferred qualifications
- PhD in Economics or a related discipline.
- Knowledge of the GTAP database and the assumptions used to generate this dataset from underlying input datasets.
- Ability to develop software programs that will allow efficient transformation of these data into estimates of employment and job quality in the agrifood sector, and permit updates as the underlying datasets evolve.
Application deadline: May 4, 2024