Occupation Choice in the Rural Labor Market from the Córdoba Department in Colombia

This article aims to establish if the rural labor market ofthe Department of Córdoba holds structural problems thatencourage members of the rural labor force to search for otherwork alternatives in the urban area, by identifying factorsrelated to supply conditions, such as human capital, age, homelocation area [dominion], gender, and others that affect thechoice of the kind of work. A multinomial Logit econometricmodel was estimated to achieve this purpose, using statisticalinformation from the Great Integrated Household Survey(GIHS) carried out by DANE from the third quarter of 2019,whereby the employment choice of men and women in ruraland urban areas was analyzed among four categories, i.e.low manual (1), high manual (2), low non-manual (3), andhigh non-manual (4).

Results reveal that the estimated modelshows a good fit and that the education, gender, and domainvariables are statistically significant with confidence levelsgreater than 95%. Similarly, figures of the marginal effects,which reveal changes in probabilities of choosing one job oranother, may be evidence of the little consolidation that therural labor market has to motivate its inhabitants to choosecountryside activities, allowing to conclude that the migrationphenomenon from the countryside to the city is largelyexplained by the search for better jobs, thus revealing the structural problems of the rural labor market in the CordobaDepartment. [Publisher's text]