Female labour force participation rates have stagnated in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. This paper aims to explain this aggregate pattern by decomposing it into the labour supply behaviour of different birth cohorts and age...
We estimate the relative importance of alternative labour supply and demand mechanisms in explaining the rise of female labour force participation over the last 55 years in Mexico. The growth of female labour force participation in Mexico between...
The Nordic model relies on high tax rates to finance an extensive welfare state. If labour supply elasticities are large, the burden of financing the model can be large even if, arguably, the practice of providing subsidised goods that support labour...
Volatility in commodity markets poses a distinct risk to farmers in developing countries who rely on cash crop agriculture. We combine a time series of international coffee prices with a long-running panel on coffee-growing households in Vietnam to...
Human talent is a key economic resource and a source of creative power in science, technology, business, arts and culture and other activities. Talent has a large economic value and its mobility has increased with globalization, the spread of new...
Volatility in commodity markets poses an acute risk to farmers in developing countries who rely on cash crop agriculture. We combine a time series of international coffee prices with a long-running panel on coffee-growing households in Vietnam to...
This study estimates the relative importance of alternative supply and demand mechanisms in explaining the rise of female labor-force participation (FLFP) over the last 55 years in Mexico. The growth of FLFP in Mexico between 1960 and 2015 followed...
Over the last fifteen years many African countries have experienced a ‘mining take-off’. Mining activities have bifurcated into two sectors: large-scale, capital-intensive production generating the bulk of the exported minerals, and small-scale...
A cash transfer programme ‘Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty’ has been implemented with the aim of addressing poverty and vulnerability in Ghana. This study looks at the impact of this conditional cash transfer programme on households’ supply of...
This paper investigates if changes in the minimum wage have influenced changes on the formality and informality rates, and the level of wages in Ecuador. A 12-year panel was built. It allows to overcome the short time span of household data and so to...
The paucity of non-agricultural paid employment, and under utilization of female labour in Uganda, and other sub-Saharan African countries, is often seen to be the next major obstacle to further poverty reduction and development in the region...
Tony Addison This year has rushed by at speed. For UNU-WIDER it’s been a year of big successes. We will have published some 110 working papers by the...
This paper discusses cultural barriers to women’s participation and success in the labor market in developing countries. I begin by describing how gender norms influence the relationship between economic development and female employment, as well as...
A key policy problem in most developing countries is the size of the informal sector and its persistence over time. In need to increase their tax revenues, policy makers face a trade-off between decreasing tax rates (making formalizing potentially...
This paper aims to study the impact of migration on labour supply and time-use of women left behind in Kyrgyzstan. Using the household survey data for 2011, labour supply is measured by occupational choices and working hours. Apart from the labour...
31 October 2013 Tony Addison October finds Angle in New York, for our event on ‘Fragility and Aid–What Works?’ at the Permanent Mission of Germany to...
30 October 2014 Dominik Etienne and Annett Victorero The last decade has witnessed a revival of concern over the impact of high-income concentration...
This paper investigates whether cyclical variation in women’s labour supply in Africa contributes to smoothing household consumption. We find little support for this hypothesis. Using comparable individual data on about 0.5 million women in 30 Sub...
The Republic of Haiti is a prime international remittance recipient country in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, relative to its gross domestic product (GDP). The downside of this fact may be that Haiti, based on population size, is also...
This paper provides an overview on the impacts of food aid. We consider its effects on consumption, nutrition, food markets and labour supply, as well as the extent to which it exacerbates or mitigates conflict. We also consider the comparative...
Part of Book Wider Perspectives on Global Development
On the 10th of April, 2012, the African Development Bank and UNU-WIDER organized a research workshop on the theme of ‘Employment in Tunisia: What Do We Know? What is the Way Forward?’. The aim of this workshop was to bring together universities and...
Part of Book The International Mobility of Talent
This paper investigates the impact of social transfer programmes on school enrollment and child labour in Malawi utilizing a micro-simulation evaluation method. Four hypothetical cash transfer programmes, differentiated in terms of their conditions...
Part of Journal Special Issue The New Economy
Whether cash transfers have unintended behavioural effects on the recipient household’s labour supply is of considerable policy interest. We examine the ‘intent to treat effect’ of the Indira Gandhi National Old-Age Pension Scheme on prime-age women...
Several sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have achieved substantial economic growth in the past 30 years. Likewise, access to education has considerably expanded, as reflected in rising enrolment rates for both men and women. Female labour force...
Low- and middle-income countries face a trade-off between raising tax revenue to strengthen social protection and creating incentives for the population to enter formal employment. However, empirical evidence on labour supply elasticities in the...
This technical note presents one of the modelling approaches used in Jara and Rattenhuber (2022) to estimate formal employment elasticities, namely the estimation of a discrete choice model of labour supply with informal employment. The approach...
The paper uses the Lewis model as a framework for examining the labour market progress of two labour-abundant countries, China and South Africa, towards labour shortage and generally rising labour real incomes. In the acuteness of their rural-urban...
Female labor force participation rates have been stagnating despite rising female education in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. Using representative and repeated census data from a heterogeneous sample of 13 sub-Saharan African...
This paper investigates whether cyclical variation in women’s labour supply in Africa contributes to smoothing household consumption. We find little support for this hypothesis. Using comparable individual data on about 0.5 million women in 30 Sub...
The East Asian countries are currently experiencing declining fertility rates and aging of their populations. The demographic transition is beginning to affect various societal functions, and increasing international migrants are becoming one of the...
When seeking to increase their tax revenues, policy-makers face a likely tradeoff between decreasing personal income tax rates (making formalizing more attractive and potentially contributing to revenue) and alternatively raising tax rates...
This paper assesses the contribution of software to India's economic development, paying particular attention to the role of software in the absorption of labour and the development of human capital in the economy. India's specialization in software...
What are the links between development, social change, and women's status in the modernizing countries of the Middle East and North Africa? What is the relationship between socio-economic development, patriarchal structures, and the advancement of...
Part of Book Urbanization and Development in Asia
Part of Book African Youth and the Persistence of Marginalization
Part of Book Health Inequality and Development
Part of Book Golden Age of Capitalism
This paper is related to the literature on the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the labour market of host countries. Labour market literature has focused on the demand side of FDI; that is, increasing wage inequality by demanding more...
Kaushik Basu is known for the expert way in which he brings the tools of economic and philosophical analysis to bear on current development issues. In recent years his interests have included questions concerned with international labour standards...
In the 1960s food aid made up nearly 20 per cent of overall overseas development aid, today that figure is five per cent. Increasingly food aid is provided as emergency relief rather than as a form of long term support and many donors have expressed...
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