"This paper identifies and estimates the strength of the reduction in poverty linked to improved opportunities for women in the expanding maquila sector. A simulation exercise shows that, at a given point in time, poverty in Honduras would have been 1.5 percentage points higher had the maquila...

The gender wage gap in Thailand is much less significant than in most countries in the world. The average hourly wage among female workers, in fact, slightly surpasses that of males. This highly equitable gender wage pattern is seen at all levels of the wage distribution. Female representation...

There is growing interest, worldwide, in the link between education systems and the production of skills that are valued in the labor market. With growth stagnating and unemployment soaring in much of the world, educators are being asked to focus more on producing skills that feed into labor...

"Do public sector workers earn a wage premium in Djibouti and are the returns to education different across the sectors? The authors estimate private and public sector wage earnings using 1996 household survey data, while controlling for selectivity using Heckman's two stage approach. They find...

Jordan faces extremely high levels of youth unemployment: 19 percent of male and 48 percent of female youth between the ages of 19 to 24 years old want to work but can't find jobs. For men, the transition from school to work is slow (on average 15 months), but for women the school to work...

"This paper examines the differentiated outcomes of vocational and general secondary academic education, particularly in terms of employment opportunities, labor market earnings, and access to tertiary education in Indonesia. With data from a panel of two waves of the Indonesia Family Life...

"In determining whether a country's higher education system should be expanded, it is important for policymakers first to determine the extent to which high private returns to post-secondary education are an indication of the scarcity of graduates instead of the high unobserved ability of...

This book aims to contribute to the World Bank's education agenda by communicating research findings on the impact of education quality on economic growth. Eric Hanushek and Ludger Wößmann show that indeed the quality of education, rather than mere access to education, is what impacts economic...