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Publications (23)
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– The Case of South Africa
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, legislation, and institutions on labour market...
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The informal sector makes up an overwhelming share of both gross domestic product and total employment in Africa. In this paper, we lay out some of the basic characteristics of the informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa, relevant institutions, and development issues. Proposed policy approaches...
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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 exports of labour-intensive products are vital to...
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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 characterize changes over time. Results suggest...
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– Productivity, Policy Syndromes, and the Importance of Institutions
Recent evidence from an exhaustive political economy study of growth of African economies—the growth project of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) suggests that ‘policy syndromes’ have substantially contributed to the generally poor growth in sub-Saharan Africa during post-independence...
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Using panel datasets from Mexico and Chile for the 2000s, we examine the determinants of middle-class intra-generational mobility. We define the middle class by means of a latent index of economic wellbeing that is less sensitive to short-term fluctuation and measurement error than standard measures...
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– Evidence from Thailand
This paper attempts to contribute to the understanding of the impacts of secure rural agricultural land rights on labour structural transformation from agriculture to non-agriculture as well as on urbanization, with a specific focus on Thailand. Using province-level panel data and instrumental...
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– Turnout, Partisanship, and Protest
The youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Today, as the region faces a growing ‘youth bulge’ that is disproportionately burdened by un- and underemployment, capturing the votes of this demographic is becoming more important than ever before. Yet...
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Firm turnover (i.e. firm entry and exit) is a well-recognized source of sector level productivity growth across developing and developed countries. In contrast, the role and importance of firms switching activities from one sector to another is little understood. Firm switchers are likely to be...
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Economic growth in Vietnam has been fairly resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. In addition, the impact of the crises on employment and poverty is in dispute. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose impacts and estimate...
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– Evidence from Rural Western China
Using 2000-04 panel data this study analyses the pathways rural households followed out of poverty in two lagging provinces of China, Inner Mongolia and Gansu. Rising labour productivity in agriculture has been key, and still holds much promise. Labour mobility has also been important in Gansu. So...
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– The Case of the Republic of Haiti
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 the largest exporter of skilled workers in the...
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– Reasons for International Migration from Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has the highest growth rate in net international migration in the world. The reasons for this migration are investigated in this paper. First, a survey of the literature on the profile and determinants of international migration in SSA is given. Second, panel data on 45...
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– Synthesising Samples for Inequality and Poverty Analysis
We describe a new method of facilitating inequality and poverty analysis of grouped distributional data by allowing individual income observations to be reconstructed from any feasible grouping pattern. In contrast to earlier methods, our procedure ensures that the characteristics of the synthetic...
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This paper illustrates how the use of microeconometric techniques can be used to uncover the micro dynamics behind macro shocks. Using Mexican micro data we find out that—controlling for everything else—between 1994 and 1998 returns to personal characteristics in the tradable sector increased...
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– Child Labour and Capability Deprivation in India
This paper explores the hypothesis that the phenomenon of child labour is explicable in terms of poverty that compels a household to keep its children out of school and put them to work in the cause of the household’s survival. In exploring the link between child labour and poverty in the Indian...
Displaying 16 of 23 results