ABSTRACT
Before coming to the country case studies on the difference in the levels in earnings between rural and urban areas based on household surveys, we can have a brief look at published material on the earnings of wage labor. The proportion of workers employed on daily or monthly wages is not a substantial part of the labor force in Africa. They are mostly confined to labor working in plantations. But data for such workers have been regularly published in the ILO Yearbook of Labor Statistics for few countries. It is of some interest to bring together the time series of average earnings of workers in manufacturing and in agriculture for the African countries, which are available. From these time series we can construct the ratio of earnings showing the trends in the wage gap between agriculture and formal manufacturing. This gives some idea of the extent of the wage gap between the rural and urban labor markets. The data are presented in Table 7.1. For comparative purposes we also include the data on the earnings ratio for several Asian countries in the table. However, it must be remembered that the use of wage labor is much more prevalent in peasant agriculture in Asia and some of the wage data for Asian agriculture might refer to daily labor used in the peasant small-holding sector.
