G²LM|LIC

Latest News

Call for Applications: IZA/FCDO Online Development Economics Course

We are happy to announce that the IZA/FCDO Programme on Gender, Growth and Labor Markets in Low-Income Countries (G²LM|LIC) is sponsoring the ONLINE EVENT: “Development Economics Course”, January 15 – March 18, 2024. The course is free of charge for the participants.

PLEASE NOTE: This course was previously announced for September – November 2023. Due to circumstances we didn’t have any influence on, we needed to move the dates of the course.

Course instructors are Oriana Bandiera and Robin Burgess as well as amazing teaching assistants from London School of Economics. The course is designed for undergraduate students, but we can accept applications from grad/post-grad students and employees from the public and private sector as well. It is open to all residents of Asian countries on this list.

Application deadline is November 10, 2023.

Please find all details here.

Child Care Subsidies, Employment Services, and Women’s Labor Market Outcomes in Egypt

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has the lowest rates of female labour force participation globally. Despite improvements in women’s education, their participation in the workforce has stagnated or even declined in some countries. This is attributed to three main factors: the high opportunity cost of women’s time, limited job opportunities, and restrictive gender norms. Women often leave work upon marriage due to the significant amount of care work they undertake. The labour market is segmented by gender, and overall job demand is weak, which further limits employment opportunities for women. Gender norms prioritize men’s employment and discourage women from working outside the home. To address these challenges, this study conducted a randomized controlled trial in Egypt, focusing on two interventions: child care subsidies and employment services for mothers with young children. Access to early childhood care and education (ECCE) has been shown to be crucial for women’s labour force participation. Child care subsidies in low- and middle-income countries have increased women’s employment. Additionally, job matching interventions have had mixed results but have shown potential in improving women’s employment rates. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the impact of these interventions in a context with lower female labour force participation and testing the complementarity of employment services and child care subsidies. The paper discusses the outcomes of the interventions, including take-up rates, job search behaviors, and the influence of gender norms and childcare concerns on women’s participation in the labour market. The study found modest take-up of the interventions, and while they did not significantly affect job search behavior or wages, they did reveal important barriers related to gender norms, childcare norms, and concerns about nursery safety and quality. Read the detailed working paper here.

Call for Papers: Joint G²LM|LIC/BREAD Conference

G²LM|LIC and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) are pleased to announce a joint Conference on Development Economics which will take place on Friday, December 15 and Saturday, December 16 in Nairobi, Kenya. The conference will consist of presentations of advanced stage research by senior or junior researchers, and presentations of early stage research by junior researchers.

A special feature of the conference will be the option of mentoring for junior researchers based in Africa, or those with nationality from an African country, in the months before the conference by BREAD fellows and affiliates.

Submission deadline: August 17, 2023.

See the details here.

A small selection of our Projects

Our newest publications

Child Care Subsidies, Employment Services, and Women’s Labor Market Outcomes in Egypt

We provide evidence on two constraints to the participation of women in the labor market that have received sustained attention in the literature: (1) high opportunity cost of time due to childcare, and (2) limited access to employment opportunities. In a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with a sample of mothers in urban Egypt, we evaluate two interventions designed to relax these constraints: childcare subsidies and job matching services. We find that neither the subsidies nor the job matching services nor the combination of these interventions increased job search intensity or changed reservation working conditions. These results suggest that in the context of urban Egypt, relaxing these constraints is insufficient to allow women to work.

Building a Survey without a Recent Census

Low-income countries are also often data poor, lacking recent cen- suses or surveys to inform policy and programs. Without a recent national population census, countries do not know how to sam- ple for nationally-representative surveys. This brief discusses how countries can generate nationally-representative surveys without a recent census by relying on publicly available high resolution ge- ospatial data. The brief discusses how such geospatial data and sampling were used to create the Sudan Labor Market Panel Sur- vey (SLMPS) 2022. Sudan’s last population census was in 2008, a number of years ago, and before the country was divided. The SLMPS is Sudan’s first nationally representative household survey since 2014 and first labor force survey since 2011. These methods can be used in other contexts that lack a recent official census or for sampling between censuses in areas with substanial changes in population.

Improving Health and Safety in the Informal Sector: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Bangladesh

Workers in small businesses in low- and middle-income countries are exposed to significant risks of occupational accidents and illnesses. A safe and healthy workplace could improve the productivity and sustainability of the business. In this paper, we conduct a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh that provides informal firms with information on occupational health and safety (OHS) to improve their workplace practices. The intervention comprised two treatment arms: one focused solely on OHS training (the OHS arm), while the other oered business training and access to financing in addition to OHS training (the OHS+Biz arm). After two years, treated firms showed improvements in business practices, particularly those related to safety and a decent work environment. Moreover, both treatment arms experienced increased output and sales revenue. The OHS+Biz arm generally had no additional impact on firm outcomes compared to the OHS arm, suggesting that OHS information is the primary factor driving safer and healthier workplaces, which consequently can lead to better firm outcomes.

Browsers Don’t Lie.

The authors measure the digital impact of the Indian COVID-19 lockdown using an online survey coupled with consensually provided browser history records from over 1,000 individuals, spanning over 30 million website visits. Browser histories provide the authors with rich and objective historical time-use information that they collected without access to the extensive in-depth and in-person questioning, involving multiple time windows (e.g., past day/week/month), typically required for verification and validation in time-use surveys, while also avoiding the measurement problems of recall bias and misreporting in subjective reports.

Is Mobile Money Changing Rural Africa? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa are typically underserved by financial services. Mobile money brings a substantial reduction in the transaction costs of remittances. We follow the introduction of mobile money for the first time in rural villages of Mozambique using a randomized field experiment. We find that mobile money increased migration out of these villages, where we observe lower agricultural activity and investment. At the same time, remittances received and welfare of rural households increased, particularly when facing geo-referenced village-level floods and household-level idiosyncratic shocks. Our work suggests that mobile money can accelerate urbanization and structural change in Sub-Saharan Africa.

See all publications