The Employment Lab: New Diagnostic Tools for Employment Focused Development

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.

This course builds on the recently released Employment Lab, a diagnostic toolkit developed by PRMPR. It introduces a number of user-friendly software packages, including:

• the decomposition package, JoGGs, which decomposes GDP per capita changes into employment and productivity shifts within and across sectors and demographic changes;
• STATA based ADePT-Labor, for analyzing labor market changes in micro data and the relation between labor market and poverty;
• ADePT-Gender which produces gender-disaggregated statistics on employment; and
• STATA code for conducting labor market analysis with panel data.

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.

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