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From The Editor's Desk (October 2012)Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later...
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Imed Drine Many observers see youth unemployment as the major reason behind the recent popular uprisings in a number of Arab countries. Increasing...
Economist Imed Drine recently left UNU-WIDER and headed with his family for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to take up a new position as a senior economist with...
Luis-Felipe Lopez-Calva [1] The concept of social class and specifically middle class, has been widely discussed in sociology and other social...
M.G. Quibria In the wake of the worst famine of Bangladesh of the post-World War era Professor Muhammad Yunus launched a microcredit experiment in...
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
Carl-Gustav Lindén The research project ReCom-Research and Communication on foreign aid, which is co-ordinated by UNU-WIDER with funding from the...
This paper provides a historical overview of the South African trade union movement, followed by a brief discussion of the labour market legislation and institutions formed since 1994. Thereafter, a detailed evaluation of the impact of trade unions...
This study examines the relationship between growth and employment in Nigeria to gain insights into the country's paradox of high economic growth alongside rising poverty and inequality. The methodology adopted is the Shapley decomposition approach...
This paper documents and analyses the predominance of informal employment in Africa and shows that lack of demand for labour rather than worker characteristics is the main reason for pervasive underemployment. Integration into the global economy and...
This paper looks to uncover the growth traps and opportunities for the South African economy, with a focus on underlying labour market dynamics. We explore the potential of South Africa’s demographic dividend. We also consider the structure of the...
This paper studies individual-level labour market transitions and their determinants in South Africa during the zenith and aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis using 2008 to 2010-2011 panel data from the National Income Dynamics...
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...
This paper examines the changing nature of occupational labour-market trends in South Africa and the resulting impact on wages. We observe high levels of demand for skilled labour that have intensified a trend already established before 1994. Over...
Prior to the 1970s, the "problems of women", in the societies where their rights were recognized, were defined and dealt with by various movements and political groups in the context of moderating or eliminating legal and customary forms of...
The rapid diffusion of computers has widely changed the consequences of computer use on the labour market. While at the beginning of the eighties knowledge of computers was an obvious advantage in a career, this same knowledge is now so commonplace...
Ethiopia has experienced rapid economic growth since 2005. Real gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average rate of 10.5 per cent per annum for the period between 2004–05 and 2013–14. Public investment in key infrastructure and interventions in...
The objective of the paper is to understand the transforming relationship between the formal and informal sector in a liberalizing open developing economy. There are various facets in this relationship, and we focus on three essential aspects. First...
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...
Understanding industry agglomeration and its driving forces is critical for the formulation of industrial policy in developing countries. Crucial to this process is the definition and measurement of agglomeration. We construct a new coagglomeration...
Much of the vast literature on changes in income distribution in advanced countries during the last two decades attributes these either to globalization (specifically in the form of trade liberalization with low-wage developing countries), or to...
The economic reform policies in the 1980s and the 1990s under the so-called Washington Consensus have recently led to growing concern for inequality. This paper looks at some of the labour market outcomes of the economic reform policies in terms of...
The dispersion of racial incomes in South Africa has been declining since the mid 1970s. This has been accompanied by rising within-group inequality, especially amongst blacks, driven by growing unemployment. Consequently, there has been little...
In estimating the prevalence of undernourishment in a region or country it has been common practice to choose a benchmark - or, as some would say, a critical limit - which reflects nutrition requirements and then to calculate the percentage of the...