The Size and Sources of Economic Rents in a Developing Country Manufacturing Labour Market.

The potential sources of rent to labor in a developing country urban labor market are considered in this paper. The data set used enables the relative importance of unions, firm size, profitability, ownership, and firm age to be assessed on the basis of cross-section evidence. It is shown that all these factors affect earnings. A panel-data-based estimation of the importance of the profitability term provides strong support for a rent-sharing theory of wage determination in a developing country similar to much recent evidence for developed country labor markets