Valuing the time of the self-employed is crucial for evaluating interventions and conducting cost-benefit analysis. Yet research often misprices this value at zero or equal to market wages. New evidence from Kenya suggests a practical fix: value unpa...
Evidence from Ethiopia suggests that while part-time jobs broaden access for workers needing flexibility, they attract lower-skill applicants and reduce productivity, helping explain part-time wage penalties and gender pay gaps.
As women’s labour force participation remains stalled globally, unlocking its benefits for empowerment and growth requires context-specific, multi-pronged policies – addressing childcare, safety, social norms, and workplace equality together.
Despite recent gains due to rural self-employment, India’s female labour force participation remains constrained by entrenched social norms and a limited availability of quality jobs – keeping the gender gap in work persistently wide.
In Brazil, labour policy aims to support the most vulnerable workers, yet actual labour practice disproportionately supports the skilled workforce in adjusting to technological change – those workers already poised to benefit from advances in digital...
Vietnam’s Special Economic Zones are not just attracting investment—they are creating better, more formal jobs, with women in rural areas benefiting most.
Material scarcity and financial constraints appear to be the main drivers of self-employment for approximately two-thirds of urban own-account workers in Brazil.
Using detailed data from a major call centre in Turkey, we find that a permanent shift to fully remote work boosts recruitment and productivity without harming service quality. Not only did this increase the share of female and small-town workers, bu...
A government-led programme in North Macedonia combined wage subsidies with matching services to decrease long-term unemployment among vulnerable jobseekers. Experimental evidence indicates that the programme significantly improved formal employment i...
