La segmentación del mercado de trabajo uruguayo y la teoría de los mundos de producción

Abstract. According to the theory of the worlds of production, a branch of the Economics of Conventions, the labor markets are organized on the basis of collective conventions (on productivity and unemployment). This document introduces such a theory and then proposes a simple application of it for the Uruguayan labor market. In the application we obtain the result that, in 1998, the sector in which a worker was employed (according to the division between primary sector, industrial sector, and the sector of services) was a determinant  of his wage level, while in 2004 the sector is no longer a determinant of that variable. These results are consistent with the theory of the worlds of production due to the moment in which each one obtains: the first one, after a decade of relative stability, in which we can expect the development of conventions; the second one, just after a crisis, a moment in which there were no time for the arising of new conventions substituting the ones that the crisis have destroyed.