The Network Structure of Labor Mobility in Argentina

SERGIO ANDRÉS DE RACO; VIKTORIYA SEMESHENKO

Ginebra

Conferencia; 6th Conference on Regulating for Decent Work; 2019

Organización Internacional del Trabajo

Technological advances have had a direct impact on the organization of labor throughout history.The recent growth of technological advances and the acceleration in their adoption in the productiveprocesses is exponential, produces changes in the interrelation between firms, within firms andhouseholds. Firms incorporate these advances and innovations at different rates and adopt them atdifferent levels of depth, affecting how they create and destroy jobs and determine labor demand.This kind of innovations originate mainly in developed countries and are incorporated in specificsectors with greater absorption capacity, both in volume and speed. In developing countries, thereare gaps in incorporation and adoption related to development factors, but also between sectors.The way in which firms adopt and adapt these innovations changes labor demand, both inqualitative and quantitative terms.Shared workers carry tacit knowledge that makes the adoption of technology more dynamic. Theseprocesses were studied in developed countries, while in developing countries the evidence is scarce.The analysis of employment flows allows to extract information from short-term as well as long-termstructural aspects of the formal labor market. The administrative records that provide support tothese flows naturally originate a temporary network of bipartite interactions between workers andfirms from which a unimodal projection of interactions between firms can be extracted. In particular,by observing employment flows under the light of employers' economic activity, valuableinformation from the exchange of skills and abilities among different sectors of activity can beextracted that allows characterizing underlying aspects of the national productive structure.Neffke et al. (2013; 2017) defined the skill relatedness (SR) measure and developed a framework forthe analysis of labor flows. Using network reduction techniques with this indicator, it is possible toextract the "industrial space" that contains information of the interactions between productivesectors. The authors presented a meaningful structure and network representation for Germany andSweden, useful for firms activity diversification prediction. The research questions we pose are: howmuch, and to what extent these results and structure differ in the case of a developing country?In this paper we analyze how firms and productive sectors are related through the mobility ofworkers and the interaction structure that emerges from private formal employment transitionsdata from Argentina by economic activity at 4 digits ISIC disaggregation. The resulted networkpresents small world and core-periphery structure, and contrasts with the modular structureobserved for Germany.