Existing efforts to promote upward mobility in low-income countries focus on broadening access to education. However, evidence from Ethiopia shows that professional socialisation (learning professional norms) may be a key constraint to this mobility,...
Labour markets in low-income countries are characterised by informal work, in which most people cycle between casual wage labour and low-return self-employment, facing weak returns to skills and experience. Improving outcomes will require not just mo...
Internal migration in Indonesia raises wages and improves access to formal employment for the workers left behind, particularly lower-educated workers, by easing labour supply pressures and reallocating jobs across the formal and informal sector.
The new Global Gender Distortions Index (GGDI) quantifies the impact of gender gaps in the labour market, shedding light on how much higher economic activity would be if women had the same opportunities as men.
Increases in Brazil’s national minimum wage between 2000 and 2009 moved the country from a regime of low minimum wage bite to one of high bite. This column exploits variation in the bite of the reform across states and industries to reveal immediate ...
Repeated increases in the real minimum wage in early-2000s Argentina – implemented amid moderate inflation and an economic recovery – did not lead to higher job destruction as firms were able to absorb higher costs without resorting to terminations.
Training women in assertive communication in India enabled them to more effectively persuade their husbands to support their participation in the workforce – leading to substantial and sustained increases in women’s job uptake and earnings at low cos...
When female labour reforms fail to align with employer incentives, they can deepen rather than reduce gender disparities in the labour market, as shown by Iran’s 2016 reform.
