Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (744)
Working Paper
pdf
South Africa’s current electricity crises have worsened, placing the country on an uncertain and turbulent economic trajectory.To identify the manufacturing sub-sectors that are most vulnerable to this crises, we use the input–output matrices for the period between 1993 and 2021 to develop a sub...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Experimental evidence from Mozambique
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study examines the impact of digital labor-market platforms on jobs outcomes using a randomized encouragement design embedded in a longitudinal survey of Mozambican technical-vocational college graduates. We differentiate between platforms targeting formal jobs...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Lessons from Relief for Comprehensive Social Protection
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– What Is Missing from National Economic Recovery Plans?
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A Case of Domestic Workers in Delhi
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Unpacking COVID-19 Impact on Livelihoods and Poverty in Rural Areas and Urban Low-Income Settlements of Bangladesh
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Accounts from Residents of Cape Town’s Largest Township
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Differentiated Impacts and an Uneven Recovery
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– National labour surveys in five Latin American countries and field research in 11 cities around the world
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Degrees and Pathways of Impact in 11 Cities around the World
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– COVID-19 and the Informal Sector
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Supply vs demand factors
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 an S-shaped, with a considerable acceleration...
![](/sites/default/files/styles/teaser_150x200/public/cover%20image%209780198887041_Chen_r1%5B21%5D%5B82%5D.jpg?itok=7ZlNuH-7)
– Impact, Recovery and the Future
A key challenge for the post-COVID global economy is whether the disproportionate impact of the crisis on informal workers, who form the majority of the world’s workforce, will be acknowledged. Or whether harmful and negative stereotypes will persist.Today, despite the role of these essential...
Working Paper
pdf
– Indonesia and India compared
We examine the nature of labour market inequality in Indonesia and India, using a common conceptual approach drawing from the job ladder framework. In the framework, we differentiate between self-employment and wage-informal and between formal, upper tier informal, and lower tier informal jobs. We...
Working Paper
pdf
Frequent electricity outages threaten to impede the benefits of expanded access achieved by many developing countries in recent decades. A large literature documents these negative effects, however almost none consider labour market effects. This paper merges labour force survey microdata with high...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Sustaining Tanzania's Economic Development
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Theory and some evidence from India
Using the lens of a life-cycle model, we argue that an administrative failure of a wage payment delay in a workfare programme could adversely affect the welfare of the poor through two channels. First, it imposes an implicit consumption tax on the household. Second, it changes the status of labour...
Working Paper
pdf
– Does labour market information speed job-taking in Mozambique?
High youth unemployment rates and long school-to-work transition times pose a threat to low-income countries’ sustainable growth prospects. Using a randomized control trial experiment conducted in Mozambique, we find strong evidence that providing information on wages and unemployment reduces the...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper explores two policy interventions in Zambia, a minimum wage hike in 2018 and an upward revision in the first kink in the progressive income tax schedule in 2017, to examine and compare the impact of minimum wage and tax kink changes on wages and the earnings distribution in the formal and...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Biased beliefs about future labor-market earnings are commonplace. Based on a longitudinal survey of graduate work transitions in Mozambique, this study assesses the contribution of employment mismatches to a large positive gap between expected (ex ante) and realized (ex post) earnings.Accounting...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Heterogeneous impact of internet availability on female labor market outcomes in an emerging economy
– Evidence from Indonesia
Part of Journal Special Issue
Women’s Work
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Routes to social and economic empowerment
In recent decades, trends in female labour force participation rates have been very heterogeneous across developing countries, despite widespread economic growth, fertility decline, and narrowing gender gaps in education.However, globally, gender gaps in wages and labour force participation are...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
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 (potentially slowing down the formalization of the economy...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A cross-sectoral analysis from a gender perspective
Mainland Tanzania has seen two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in its social and economic structures, whilst the country continues to grapple with persisting gender inequalities. This article examines Tanzania's social policy developments from a gender perspective...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members’ activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios and assess their influence on consumption, as a...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Mozambique
Using a unique panel survey of final-year undergraduates at six of the largest universities in Mozambique, we study the wage premium associated with completing an undergraduate degree. Conditional on a very rich set of controls, including pre-degree earnings, objective measures of ability, and...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from a top university in Brazil
Using two rich administrative data sets and a rule of admission at one top university in Brazil that splits students into two classes, we apply a regression discontinuity design to study the effect of class allocation on academic performance and labor market outcomes. The last student of the first...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
This article is the first to provide estimates of how minimum wages affect worker flows and employment growth rates in an employment scarce developing country context. We investigate the effects of a large, exogenous increase in agricultural minimum wages in South Africa. We find that changes...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on formal sector employment in Uganda. Utilizing employee-level administrative tax data from the Uganda Revenue Authority, we describe the dynamics of employment as the pandemic evolved, seeking to better understand the various coping strategies...
Working Paper
pdf
– A City of Cape Town case study
Addressing unemployment and income inequalities in transport and land-use policies is important, particularly in South Africa, which is currently experiencing one of the highest unemployment rates and income inequality in the world. This research investigates the horizontal (geographical...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Viet Nam
New developments of existing technologies over time have led to emergent patterns of technology adoption and, accordingly, changing impacts on economy and society. Focusing on the arrival of mobile internet in the early 2010s in developing countries, this paper identifies significant positive...
Working Paper
pdf
This study is positioned in two strands of literature—intersectionality and social mobility. It is the first to measure (dis)advantage at the individual level as an outcome of the intersectionality of identities and parental circumstances. By linking circumstances at the parental level with (dis...
Working Paper
pdf
Using the Economic Transformation Database, this paper attempts to assess the magnitude of structural transformation and the effects of sectoral shifts due to structural transformation on the labour market performance of 18 sub-Saharan African countries over the period from 1990 to 2018. The first...
Working Paper
pdf
Faced with more favourable demand conditions, many firms raise wages. However, we show that firms with labour market power, lower productivity, and binding wage floors will absorb these positive revenue productivity shocks as excess profits instead of increasing wages or employment.Our prediction...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper investigates the role of firm characteristics in driving wage inequality and firm wage premia in the South African labour market. The Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (AKM) and Kline, Saggio, and Sølvsten (KSS) regression-based decomposition methods are applied to matched employer–employee...
Working Paper
pdf
We examine how village-level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. We distinguish between upper caste and own-group dominance and examine the mechanisms underpinning inequality in...
Working Paper
pdf
The ethnic diversity–financial inclusion nexus remains one of the least explored topics in the literature despite global attempts to promote cultural mixing due to its socioeconomic benefits. We contribute to the literature by examining the link between ethnic diversity and financial inclusion using...
Working Paper
pdf
There is a dearth of evidence on the evolution of occupational health in the developing world and on the extent to which it has been influenced by (1) the pattern of structural transformation in these economies and (2) integration with global markets.In this study, I compile a rich database on...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from South Africa
Wage subsidies served as a dominant labour market policy response around the world to mitigate job losses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, no causal evidence of their effects exists for developing countries.We use unique panel labour force survey data and exploit a temporary...
Working Paper
pdf
– A gendered analysis
This paper estimates the returns to education and their implications for wage inequality using data from the 2015/16 Namibia Income and Expenditure Survey. The paper employs recentred influence function regression to analyse the impact of education across the wage distribution and uses a simulation...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from Mozambique
We examine how returns to education have evolved in the context of post-conflict reconstruction and economic growth in Mozambique over the period 1996–2015. We show that private rates of return to education have declined at lower levels of schooling, but remained stable and possibly even increased...
Working Paper
pdf
Cameroon is an example of a developing country where the transition from agriculture to services has defied standard patterns seen in developed countries. While prior research has explored this shift’s impact on economic growth, its effects on women’s representation in the labour market have been...
Working Paper
pdf
Sub-Saharan African economies have experienced accelerated economic growth in the past two decades. In this paper we study the impact of trade-induced structural change on employment and value-added shares in sub-Saharan African economies. We find that sub-Saharan African economies have increasingly...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from Latin American countries
Part of Journal Special Issue
Women’s Work
Working Paper
pdf
– Findings from national labour surveys in five Latin American countries
This paper provides a comparative summary of recent national statistics from five Latin American countries on employment losses and gains during the peak COVID-19 years compared with pre-pandemic levels. As part of its work on the impact of the pandemic on informal workers, the Women in Informal...
Working Paper
pdf
– Lessons from relief for comprehensive social protection
This paper considers the implications of COVID-19 relief measures for the building and extension of comprehensive and universal social protection systems. It highlights three key areas emerging from the crisis, which are likely to affect the shape of social protection systems moving forward. These...
Working Paper
pdf
Throughout 2021, fiscal stimulus packages were introduced to jump-start the COVID-19 ‘post-pandemic’ economic recovery process. While calls for economic recovery packages that promise to ‘build back better’ have come from many directions, the under-allocation of recovery resources directed at...
Displaying 48 of 744 results