The formality status of a job is the most widely used indicator of job quality in developing countries. However, a number of studies argue that, at least for some workers, the informality status may be driven by choice rather than exclusion. This paper uses job satisfaction data from three...

This paper investigates the relationship between part-time work and job satisfaction using a recent household survey from Honduras. In contrast to previous work for developed countries, this paper does not find a preference for part-time work among women. Instead, both women and men tend to...

Occupational health is increasingly recognized as an important public health issue in Latin American and the Caribbean. One major concern is the absence of reliable data on its magnitude and economic consequences. The first part of the paper presents the official statistics on workplace...

The distance between perception and reality with respect to the social domains of life is often striking. Using survey data collected on Latin American countries, this paper provides an overview of the main empirical findings on the gaps between perception and reality in four social...

The objective of this report is to examine the extent to which countries in Latin America and the Caribbean participate in global value chains and what are the drivers of such participation. Production processes have been increasingly fragmented worldwide. For example, the production of the...

This paper attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of Bolivia’s labor market institutions, particularly the Plan Nacional de Empleo de Emergencia (PLANE). It is found that unemployment as conventionally defined may not be the most important problem in Bolivia’s labor market, as the...

This study contends that in Mexico there is a threshold above which drug-trafficking-related violence causes a general slowdown in the economy. Before that threshold is reached, firms and individuals pay for the increase in violence via protective security costs, a decision that is reflected in...

In this paper, the authors examine levels and trends of labor market outcomes for women in the 1990¿s using household survey data for 18 Latin American countries covering several years per country. The outcomes we analyze include labor force participation rates, the distribution of employment...

La presente nota técnica presenta un panorama del mercado laboral chileno y su contexto a nivel nacional. Esta nota incluye un diagnóstico del sector, la programación del BID para el período 2010-2014 y una matriz de resultados.