Employment Growth and Poverty Reduction | Employment Growth and Poverty Reduction focuses on the potential impact of employment and earnings on the distributional impact of growth. It highlights the crucial role productive employment plays as transmission channels between growth and poverty reduction and it emphasizes the importance of enhancing earning opportunities for the shared growth agenda. It deals directly with the role of employment generation, income from employment, and labor markets in explaining pro poor growth. |
Recent Books  Paci, Pierella and Serneels, Pieter; 2007. “Employment and Shared Growth: Rethinking the Role of Labor Mobility for Development”. World Bank Publications, DC.
The vast majority of the poor get their income from work and access to productive employment is often the only way out of poverty. However, the understanding of policy makers and their advisors on the mechanisms that make employment an effective transmission channel between growth and poverty reduction remains somewhat limited. This book brings together contributions from top specialists on a selected number of priority issues in this area. more.
 Bhorat, Haroon and Kanbur, Ravi; 2006. “Poverty and Policy in Post-apartheid South Africa”. HSRC Press, Cape Town, South Africa.
The political freedoms ushered in by the post 1994 transition were seen at that time as the basis for redressing long-standing economic deprivations suffered by the majority of the population. The reduction of poverty, in all its dimensions, was the goal.. more.
Recent Country Reports World Bank Documents and Reports Selected External Publications
Informality and Labor Market Segmentation | Informality and Labor Market Segmentation is an issue of growing significance in the developing world. Most of the poor derive all of their income, or a great part of it, from informal work. Moreover, informal employment is often characterized by poor working conditions, poor pay and the absence of any labor standards for workers. Improving the economic position of informal workers is therefore a key instrument to raise living conditions of poor workers and reduce poverty. |
Recent Books  Perry, Guillermo; Maloney, William; Arias, Omar; Fajnzylber, Pablo; Mason, Andrew; Saavedra-Chanduvi, Jaime. “Informality - Exit and Exclusion”. World Bank Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Informality in employment can lead to a less than optimal social balance in which many workers are unprotected against health- and employment-related shocks and poverty in old age. In Latin America and the Caribbean alone, 56 percent of jobs in urban areas are informal, a trend which has caused concern in recent years. This can be explained in part by marked rises in real minimum wages in some countries as well as by inadequate macroeconomic policies, according to the World Bank report.
 Guha-Khasnobis, Basudeb; Kanbur, Ravi; and Ostrom, Elinor (Edited by); 2006. “Linking the Formal and Informal Economy Concepts and Policies”. Oxford University Press.
The concepts of formal and informal remain central to the theory and practice of development more than half a century after they were introduced into the debate. They help structure the way that statistical services collect data on the economies of developing countries, the development of theoretical and empirical analysis, and, most important, the formulation and implementation of policy.. more.
World Bank Documents and Reports Selected External Publications
Firms and Job Creation | Access to productive employment is central in determining individual and household wellbeing in developing countries. Therefore, an understanding of earnings and employment dynamics is a key policy issue. Firms and Job Creation identifies barriers to the creation of more and better jobs in developing economies and highlights factors that are associated with successful strategies for productivity and employment growth. |
Recent Publications  Hamermesch, Daniel S.: 2007. "Fun with Matched Firm-Employee Data: Progress and Road Maps". IZA Discussion Paper No. 2580.
With the beginning of a worldwide burgeoning development of matched firm-employee data, it is worthwhile to examine the possibilites for using these data. This essay discusses a variety of areas in which some progress has been made and presents ideas for future research in a number of others, including the study of labor demand, search and unemployment, wage determination and time use. It concludes that such data could be as important for labor economics, and for generating new knowledge about labor markets, as have been longitudinal household datasets, but with existing restrictions on access this kind of success will be difficult to achieve. more
 Berg, Janine; Ernst, Christophe; Auer, Peter; 2006. “Meeting the Employment Challenge: Argentina, Brazil and Mexico in the global economy". ILO, Geneva, and Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Arguing that economic policies in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico favor markets over institutions and the international economy over the domestic - to the detriment of the workforce in those countries - Meeting the Employment Challenge presents extensive evidence in support of placing employment concerns at the center of economic and social policies. The authors discuss the challenges the three countries face in creating employment, as well as ... more.
World Bank Documents and Reports Selected External Publications
Back to Employment and Shared Growth |
RSS