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…
Modelling Labour Markets in LICs with Imperfect Data
Project
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…
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. …
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…