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…
Matched Employee-Employer Panel-Data for Labour Market Analysis in Zimbabwe
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…
Are Labor Costs in Africa too High?
High labor costs appear to be a factor that undermines the creation of low-skill jobs in formal manufacturing firms at a large scale in several African countries. First, there exists a small number of formal manufacturing firms in Africa. These firms face higher labor costs than similar firms in numerous comparator countries, even after controlling…
Assisting Job Search in Low-Employment Communities
Jobs are hard to find in Africa. Searching for jobs in African labour markets is expensive and time consuming. Job seekers, the young unemployed in particular, find it hard to be selected for the available positions. As a result, new employment opportunities are often not shared equally. Many economies in sub-Saharan Africa have achieved high…