Motivated by the difficulties we face in Argentina in finding quality jobs, the recurring economic crises, and the ongoing debate in recent years about the role of the State in society, we set out to explore to what extent does the national budget for employment policies affect labor statistics?
To this end, we selected the government periods 2011–2015 and 2015–2019, under the presidencies of Cristina Fernández and Mauricio Macri, respectively. These administrations were particularly interesting because they occurred in a relatively stable global and social context, avoiding, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic, and represented a clear contrast in terms of the labor and economic policies they implemented. Based on this selection, we analyzed the relationship between the executed budget for the “Labor” function and the indicators of unemployment, informality, and underemployment.
This work was developed by Ezequiel Ludueña (myself), Manuel Barragán, Micaela de Hernández, and Marco Spalleti, in the context of the SocioHackathon organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences of the National University of Córdoba last year. Our team, composed of members from Computer Science, Political Science, and Sociology, approached this research question using large public datasets and achieved first prize.
Data
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To obtain the amount invested in labor policies, we used the Open Budget database from the Ministry of Economy, specifically the dataset “Detailed expenditure budget and execution”, which contains all national government budget allocations. These amounts were deflated to allow comparison in an inflationary context.
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For the calculation of unemployment, informality, and underemployment rates, we used data from the Permanent Household Survey (EPH) conducted by INDEC. To address the absence of INDEC data for the fourth quarter of 2015, we estimated those values through linear interpolation.
Results
As a result, we found a negative correlation between the amounts invested in labor policies and the calculated rates. In other words, during the analyzed periods, higher investment in employment-related policies statistically corresponds with lower rates of unemployment, informality, and underemployment.
Our main conclusions highlight the fundamental role of the State in shaping employment, the need to complement this type of quantitative analysis with qualitative approaches, and the potential to apply our methodology to other areas, such as analyzing different budget functions or focusing on specific population groups within the EPH.
Argentine Conference on Informatics (JAIIO)
As the final step of this project, we presented our work in the Student Paper Contest at the 54th Argentine Conference on Informatics (JAIIO). There, we formalized our research in a scientific article format and shared our interdisciplinary experience in computational social sciences with other researchers and students.
Links
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