Description: The course is based on two premises: productive employment is a key pathway for the poor to exit poverty and labor markets may be segmented in various ways and may operate differently across countries. It:

• introduces basic diagnostics which help identify current barriers to the creation of more and better jobs;
• increases the understanding of how labor market conditions affect growth and poverty reduction prospects at the country level; and
• feed these considerations into more effective policy design and impact evaluation at the country level.

The course includes:

• a hands-on demonstration of the newly-released labor market module of ADePT — a window-based software package designed to generates reader-friendly tables and graphs on selected labor market indicators at various levels of disaggregation;
• a description of an integrated framework for analyzing the links between growth, employment/ productivity and poverty reduction;
• a discussion of the necessary data and a presentation of the STATA commands required to carry out this analysis.

Participants will be encouraged to use data from various countries in group-based exercises designed to provide first-hand experience on how to implement this type of analysis and how to integrate the findings into mainstream World Bank products such as Country Economic Memorandum, Poverty Assessments, etc.

Learning Objectives: The course will provide a set of instruments designed to enhance the employment focus of development strategies.

The group work highlighted empirical results from Nicaragua and Bangladesh.

Full country reports:

• Bangladesh: The Role of Employment and Earnings in Shared Growth (456kb PDF)
• The Role of Employment and Labor Earnings for Shared Growth: The Case of Nicaragua (619kb PDF)

A short overview for each report can be found below:

• Bangladesh: Introduction (75kb PDF)
• Nicaragua: Executive Summary (100kb PDF)

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