Country Cases and Labor Market Classifications

• First generation. Consider a married couple that engage in agricultural work on a family farm and have a daughter. Since they live in a country with an export-oriented apparel industry, they can encourage their daughter to move to more-urban areas to work in an apparel factory. The daughter takes a job in an apparel factory and sends most of her earnings home to her parents to support the family, which also increases the average income of families in that rural area.

• Second generation. While this woman is working in the apparel factory, she gets married, and she and her husband have a daughter. Her income supports her husband and children, and she stays employed in the apparel factory. With the extra income earned through her job and the availability of secondary schools in the area, her daughter can complete upper-secondary education, giving her the credentials as a young woman to pursue a more career-like opportunity in a mid-skill service industry as a clerk or as a sales or service associate. Or perhaps a new apparel factory opens that pays higher wages and requires workers to have upper-secondary education, and the young woman chooses to continue in the industry.

• Third generation. If this woman then marries and continues to work, her daughter, in turn, could continue her studies through tertiary education and enter the labor market as a career professional—thanks to greater family wealth, access to tertiary education, and availability of career opportunities in urban areas.

This exact pattern may be unlikely in many cases. The intergenerational jumps in education and occupations may be smaller, a young woman may have multiple children and leave the workforce, or she may return to her hometown to raise a family. But the example does illustrate the importance of female jobs, such as apparel work, to the development process. In the absence of export-oriented manufacturing and services, women in lower-middle-income countries often have few formal employment opportunities. Without female jobs, there is low demand to increase female education and few ways to increase family income.

We naturally select countries important to the global apparel industry to identify labor market characteristics, opportunities, and challenges that the industry represents for the jobs-to-careers transition. Our apparel country cases represent a variety of circumstances and geographic areas. Other LMICs with important apparel industries (such as Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Jordan) were considered but were not selected because of data limitations.

CASE COUNTRY CHARACTERISTICS

All the case countries except Egypt have been among the top 10 global apparel exporters at some point in the past three decades, and all have a higher apparel export value than the global average. Another commonality is their dependence on apparel exports. Among our case countries, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka have the highest shares of total exports from apparel (with textile and apparel products being their main national exports), and Bangladesh and Cambodia have been dependent on apparel exports for over two decades.

Yet the apparel industry is also at varying stages of importance among these countries. The apparel share of exports peaked and is now declining in Cambodia, Egypt, Turkey, and Vietnam; is still increasing in Bangladesh and Pakistan; and remains flat in Sri Lanka.

Moreover, our case countries entered apparel exporting in different ways and advanced in income status during different periods. Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam began in apparel manufacturing, whereas Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey focused on fibers and textiles before moving into apparel exporting. Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Vietnam transitioned from low-income to lower-middleincome countries between 2005 and 2015, while Egypt and Sri Lanka transitioned between 1994 and 1997, and Turkey transitioned from lower-middle- to upper-middleincome status in 2004.

In all the countries, however, apparel is the largest employer of females among manufacturing industries, and the number of female and male apparel workers increased over the periods of the labor force surveys analyzed. But while females account for 80 percent of apparel employment in Vietnam, 79 percent in Cambodia, and 72 percent in Sri Lanka, they represent less than half (46 percent) in both Bangladesh and Pakistan and 31 percent in Egypt (table 1.1). Turkey stands exactly at the halfway point.

Strikingly, consistent with the U-shape found in the cross-section of FLFP statistics and GDP per capita (shown earlier in figure 1.2), our case countries show that women are highly employed in either the agriculture or services sector, depending on each country’s stage of industrialization. And wherever there is high female concentration in either of those sectors, the overall share of women in manufacturing is low. Yet the apparel manufacturing industries (often combined with textiles and leather manufacturing) are the major employers of women in manufacturing in all the case countries (box 1.3).

LABOR MARKET CLASSIFICATIONS

Note that the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) system is the basis for describing economic activities. It can be used to group economic activities into three sectors: agriculture (which includes forestry, fishing, and