The Democratic Security Policy: Socioeconomic Effects in the Rural Areas, 2002-2006
The series Working Papers on Economics is published by the Office for Economic Studies at the Banco de la República (Central Bank of Colombia). The works published are provisional, and their authors are fully responsible for the opinions expressed in them, as well as for possible mistakes. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.
This paper measures the impact of strengthening the security policy on the rural labour market in Colombia by exploiting the structural change in the number of rural seizures. The new policy produced dissimilar effects across gender, age-groups, and types of occupation. For adults, especially for women, there were important reductions in the labour participation, with simultaneous reductions in the income across the most representative types of workers, self-employees and day-laborers. For male youths and children there was an increase in the labor participation through the day-labor activities, while females seemed to participate less as self-employees. In general there was a socioeconomic loss in terms of reductions of adult’s labour supply and income, while for youths and children there is a differentiated effect by gender in the labour participation, and no significant connections were found with school enrollment.
