The number of COVID-19 cases in Africa is exponentially increasing and WHO experts fear not only many fatalities but also devastating social and economic consequences. African governments have responded to the pandemic by strict shutdowns of public life and, thereby, economic activities. The pandemic therefore not only imposes a global health threat, but it poses…
Resilience and recovery: The economic impact of COVID-19 on the informal sector in Uganda
Project
Returns to Childcare and Capital: Experimental Evidence from Uganda
Microenterprises are an important source of employment, and developing such enterprises is a key policy concern in most countries, especially in low-income countries where they employ more than half of the labor force. While there is optimism about the power of finance for small-scale business development, a growing literature shows that success cannot be taken…
Gender Differences in the Effects of the ‘Great Lockdown’on Time Use
This research will address whether and how the coronavirus pandemic exacerbates barriers to gender parity in developing countries by asymmetrically affecting time use for men and women. The effects of COVID-19 are likely to differ by gender (Alon et al., 2020), but the nature and extent of those differences are uncertain. The study, therefore, proposes…
Meet Your Future: Job Search Effort and Aspirations of Young Jobseekers
The study is looking for add-on funding for descriptive data collection around COVID-19 using two samples from an existing ongoing project called “Meet You Future: Job Search Effort and Aspirations of Young Jobseekers”. The main study –jointly funded by a JPAL initiative and an IDRC grant -investigates the relevant barriers to quality employment that young…
Enhancing Youth Employment and Small Firms Growth
Project
Labour Markets and Household Enterprises
It is a general tenet of economic theory that competitive markets, supported by adequate infrastructure and institutions, do a better job of determining prices and allocating resources than do large-scale government planning programmes. In the structural adjustment era of the 1980s-90s, this belief underpinned a historic shift away from central planning and toward market liberalisation…
Asymmetric Information on the Skills of Workers and Matching in the Labour Market
Youth unemployment is a serious issue in developing countries, where around 60% of young people are currently unemployed or underemployed [ILO 2013]. Understanding the determinants of youth employment in LICs is thus highly policy relevant, not just for policies related to labour market functioning and attachment, but also for those debates related to the incentives…
Modelling Labour Markets in LICs with Imperfect Data
Despite the centrality of the labour market to the questions of poverty and inequality, African labour markets are not well understood and significant research gaps exist. These gaps have important implications: they weaken the ability of governments to design and implement effective policies and hamper the monitoring of change and the measurement of impact. Within…