This article examines the structure of gender and ethnic wage gaps and the distribution of both paid and unpaid work in LAC countries. Its main contribution is to expose the double discrimination endured by women in the region. Indeed, the results indicate that women are highly discriminated in the job market and undertake most of the domestic activities in the household, allocating in average 40 hours per week to paid market activities and another 40 hours to in-home unpaid activities. The indigenous population also suffers from discrimination, but the wage gap is mainly explained by the difference in endowments, highlighting their limited access to education and their concentration in rural areas. The wage quantile decomposition results suggest the presence of sticky floor effects for both women and indigenous workers.

This paper uses national representative data from the Ecuadorian Family Expenditure survey to study the determinants of poverty and informality in the country, taking into account the two-way relationship between these two phenomena. The main contribution of this paper is to present new empirical evidence on this relationship for a developing country where more than 60% of workers are in the informal sector. The results support the view of a heterogeneous informal market, in which informal work is both a demand-led phenomenon and a voluntary and primarily supply-led form of employment.