Labour markets in low-income countries experience many frictions that impair efficient firm-worker matching (Behrman, 1999). Information frictions can hinder firms’ attempts to observe workers’ skills and productivity (Abel et al., 2016; Bassi & Nansamba, 2017; Carranza et al., 2017), spatial frictions can separate firms and workers (Franklin, 2017), regulatory frictions can deter firms from hiring…
Labour Markets
Structural Change, International Trade, and Labour Markets in a Low-Income Country
The project consists of two parts. The first part of the project seeks to understand the relationship between trade, employment, and productivity in a low-income country setting. This topic is particularly timely in the context of recent bilateral free trade agreements and international trade negotiations, which aim to improve the trading prospects of low-income countries. …
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…
Food Constraints and “Ganyu” Labour
Small-scale farming continues to be the principal source of employment and income for a majority of the population in low-income countries. Zambia is no exception: in 2008, 80% of employment was in agriculture. Even though Zambia has recently been re-classified as lower middle-income country primarily due to its large copper and cobalt exports, most Zambian…
Public Works Programs and Farm Household Behaviour
Public Works Programs (PWPs) are important tools for social protection. At the time of the beginning of the project, there were 167 PWPs in 29 sub-Saharan Africa. There are short-term and long-term PWPs. Short-term PWPs can stabilise consumption in response to individual or aggregate shocks. Long-term programs, on the other hand, are forms of insurance.…
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…
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…
Social Insurance and Labour Market Outcomes in Ethiopia
This project aimed at evaluating the labour market implications of a major social insurance reform program in Ethiopia introduced in June 2011. Employment based and mandatory pension schemes for workers in the formal private sector of Ethiopia were introduced by this reform. Given the high urban unemployment rate in Ethiopia, which at the time of…
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…
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…