In 2005, India’s Parliament passed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a landmark in social protection legislation for the country. The Act moved employment into the domain of legally enforceable rights for a population no less than 120 million, making it the largest work/welfare programme in the world. Since 2009, the eponymous anti-poverty…
Empowering Women through Public Policy
The Formal-Informal Labour Nexus and Growth
Although employment in low-income countries (LICs) is strikingly concentrated in the informal sector, the contribution of this sub-economy to the larger economy is not well understood. The traditional view holds that labour markets are segmented; the informal sector provides subsistence income, or a pool of surplus labour for the formal sector, and will likely disappear…
Fairtrade, Labour Markets and Women’s Economic Empowerment in Ethiopia
Fairtrade has spread under the promise that it has the power to lift poor smallholder farmers out of poverty by providing them with technical assistance, credit, and better prices for their crops. Fairtrade is also viewed as a niche market for high value products in a context of globalisation and trade liberalisation policies that affect…
Women’s Access to Public Transport and Labour Force Participation
This project focuses on the labour market entry situation for women in Pakistan. Social norms against women coming into close contact with unrelated men and the discomfort social stigma and threat of possible harassment when they do so, restricts women’s use of public transport in urban areas of many countries, including in South Asia. This…
Matched Employee-Employer Panel-Data for Labour Market Analysis in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is a low-income economy emerging from years of economic crisis. The crisis had a profound impact on production, employment and human development. The policy challenges to growth and recovery are severe and will require rigorous economic analysis drawing on a detailed understanding of the field and relevant data of a high quality. This project…
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…
Promoting Migrant Remittances using Mobile Banking
Recent research has shown that migrant remittances are extremely important sources of funding for developing countries, as they are generally large in magnitude and stable in times of macroeconomic volatility. But there is still much to be learned about remittance flows in this context, both in terms of their determinants and consequences. This research project…
The Urban Geography of Entrepreneurship and Growth in India
Rapid urbanisation is a major phenomenon in many developing countries. Cities are the engines of economic development; however, little is known about what determines the success of cities in developing countries, nor about the factors that shape the characteristics of rapid urbanisation. The historical literature on urban economics is rooted in the rise of the…
Wage Compression in Low Income Labour Markets
Do relative pay comparisons matter for worker behaviour? A long tradition in economic thought – as well as in psychology, sociology, and human resource management – has advanced the notion that individuals care about not only their own pay but also their pay relative to that of their co-workers. When subjected to unequal pay, workers…
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…