Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (23)
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...
Working Paper
pdf
– The sub-Saharan experience
COVID-19 cases were first confirmed in March 2020 in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. These countries put in place several stringent measures, including lockdowns, to contain the spread of the virus. Various policies were also rolled out to address the disruption in economic activities, to mitigate...
Blog
– Experimental evidence from Mozambique
Digital technologies can be deployed to improve job search, but their effectiveness in practice is disrupted. This column uses experimental data to investigate the effect of a digital job-matching platform on the labour outcomes of young people in Mozambique. The ‘treatment’ of a text message...
Working Paper
pdf
We investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on income levels, poverty, and inequality in both the immediate aftermath and during the uneven recovery until December 2021 using high-frequency household survey data from India. We find that the average household incomes dropped sharply during the...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper makes the case that current social contracts are often inadequate, irrelevant, or unjust for informal workers. It outlines three possible future scenarios: the bad old contract, an even worse contract, and a better new contract.Under the bad old contract, informal workers lacked legal...
Working Paper
pdf
– Degrees and pathways of impact in 11 cities around the world
This paper presents findings from two rounds (2020 and 2021) of a study on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on informal workers in 11 cities across five regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and North America). The study, carried out by the WIEGO network in partnership...
Working Paper
pdf
– A stalled recovery
This paper seeks to identify the differentiated impacts of the crisis on specific groups of informal workers. The analysis draws on official nationally representative labour force surveys collected quarterly by South Africa’s national statistical agency (Statistics South Africa). Based on an...
The COVID-19 crisis — the pandemic, restrictions, and recession — has not been a grand leveler. While all of us, rich and poor, faced the fear and uncertainty of the virus, the crisis has exposed and amplified pre-existing inequalities, injustices, and insecurities. Depending on their positionality...
Working Paper
pdf
The social and economic impact of COVID-19 has been deep, wide-ranging, and multi-dimensional. While anecdotal evidence of distress among the poor, particularly those with informal occupations, has been widespread, effective policy response has required real-time, researched data disaggregated for...
Working Paper
pdf
With data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, this paper examines how firm-level resilience capabilities interact with government support in the reduction of lay-offs among formal firms in Central America. We estimate two latent variables to approximate resilience-related capabilities before...
Working Paper
pdf
– Urban-to-rural labour transitions from the factory to the informal economy
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions through a feminist political economy lens and adopting a life-cycle approach to...
The Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project has been tracking the daily spending of 60 poor households in rural Bangladesh for the last six years. Analysis of the data collected – especially the changes to spending patterns that have occurred during the pandemic – reveals four areas where policymakers...
Youth (those aged 15–29) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face notoriously precarious employment prospects. Youth unemployment is the highest in the world — currently 23% in Arab States and 30% in Northern Africa in 2019, and nondecreasing.1 Unemployment among young women in the region is...
Informality is a pervasive phenomenon in the labour markets of developing countries. Two billion workers, representing 61.2 per cent of the world’s employed population, are in informal employment. Emerging and developing countries account for more than 93 per cent of total global informal employment...
Displaying 16 of 23 results