This paper is a work-in-progress and was developed to advance our thinking on how to make Jobs Diagnostics more strategic and to explore how guidance can best bridge the link from jobs analysis through prioritization, to recommendations. It will continue to evolve as we undertake more...

Mozambique is about to face two transformative opportunities for accelerating the pace of poverty reduction: the prospect of major resource inflows from the extraction of liquid natural gas (LNG) and other minerals, and the prospect of a significant demographic dividend. But to take advantage of...

This report focuses on the challenge of Mozambique's jobs transition: how to accelerate the shift into higher value-added activities and better livelihoods. As Mozambique enters the next phase of the demographic transition, the working-age population (WAP) is growing rapidly. Education levels...

Protectionism and industrial regulation are two topics in which the interplay of politics and economics is so strong that one wonders why the intellectual merger between the two approaches in the New Political Economy has taken so long. After describing the emergence of the state in Western...

The high commercial lending rates Nicaragua is currently experiencing, together with a perceived scarcity of credit, have often been blamed for the country's slow growth and have been considered a major failing of the adjustment program initiated in 1991. The author insists that such blame is...

Mexico's growth rate began to plummet at roughly the same time that its public investment expenditures declined. That decline also appears to coincide with a slowdown in the growth of infrastructure capital in the electricity, transport, and communications sectors. Because of these parallel...

Education attainment levels increased dramatically for Mexico's labor force in the 1980s and early 1990s. In parallel, the country experienced a pronounced increase in earnings inequality from 1984-94, reflected in a higher dispersion of wages and an absolute decline in the real incomes of less...

Most observers of economic events have noticed a considerable increase in the general volatility of prices over the last decade. An important byproduct often attributed to this increased price variability is greater uncertainty perceived by individual decisionmakers in the process of formulating...

Whether the interests of a nation are best served by maintaining fixed exchange rates or by allowing exchange rates to vary continues to be a much debated issue among economists. Most of the earlier literature on this topic focused attention on the two extremes of completely fixed exchange rates...