Applied Mathematics, 2016, 7, 177-182 Published Online February 2016 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/am http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/am.2016.73017 How to cite this paper: Moss, C.B., Mbaye, S. and Oehmke, J.F. (2016) Information Measures of Wages and Employment: Application to Senegal. Applied Mathematics, 7, 177-182. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/am.2016.73017 Information Measures of Wages and Employment: Application to Senegal Charles B. Moss 1 , Samba Mbaye 2 , James F. Oehmke 3 1 Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA 2 Department of Economics and Management Scienes, Universite Gaston Berger de Saint Louis, Saint Louis, Senegal 3 United States Agency for International Development, Washington DC, USA Received 5 November 2015; accepted 22 February 2016; published 25 February 2016 Copyright © 2016 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract This paper develops an information theoretic estimator of wage and employment shifts that pro- vides quantification of and inference about type of employment (full time, part time, seasonal, unemployed) and industry share of employment. It is applied to determine the effects of two United States Agency for International Development (USAID) projects on employment in villages in the Tambacounda and Kedougou provinces in Senegal. The projects support the development of local forest-based production and processing industries. The results demonstrate statistically sig- nificant and positive effects on employment and the industry composition of employment. Keywords Information Theory, Agribusiness Development, Agro-Forestry, Forest Resources, Poverty Reduction 1. Introduction An emerging literature recognizes the importance of rural non-farm employment in development processes [1]-[3] and poverty reduction [4]-[6], as do political statements such as the African Union’s Malabo Declaration including support for creating “job opportunities for at least 30%” of African youth, focused on rural and agri- business employment. Yet the development literature is relatively under-invested in empirical measurement that quantifies a systemic shift from subsistence agriculture to rural wage employment. Current measures quantify changes in the share of employment in a particular sector such as manufacturing or services, but they do not provide systemic comparison of industry-level employment data across local rural economies. However, a de-