Consistent with its focus on social policies, Sri Lanka has devoted significant attention to worker protection. One of the main pillars of its worker protection policy is the Termination of Employment of Workman Act (TEWA) introduced in 1971. The act aims to limit unemployment by raising the...

This paper reviews labor market trends throughout the developing world, identifies issues and policy priorities across groups of countries, and derives implications for the World Bank's new social protection and labor strategy. Five key issues are identified: a high and growingshare of the labor...

This paper investigates how enforcement of labor regulation affects firm size and other firm characteristics in Brazil. The authors explore firm level data on employment, capital, and output, city level data for economic city characteristics and new administrative data measuring enforcement of...

This paper analyzes the link between firm size and the investment in job training by employers. Using a large firm level data set across 99 developing countries, we show that a strong and positive correlation in the investment in job training and firm size is a robust statistical finding both...

The informal sector is typically characterized as being very heterogeneous and possibly composed of two clearly distinct segments, sometimes called the lower and upper tier. However, empirical evidence shows that even among lower tier entrepreneur's profitability can be quite high. The authors...

In this paper the authors analyze the relationship between personal opinions about the social security system and levels of informal employment using data from a recent household survey carried out in Bulgaria. They compare different indicators of job informality, focusing on the lack of social...

The paper contains a framework for linking social protection with growth and productivity, an updated review of the literature, new original work filling in gaps in the available evidence, and a discussion of operational implications. The paper demonstrates that there was a shift in the...

This paper presents a framework for designing and implementing social protection and labor (SP&L) systems in middle and low income countries. Although the term'system'is used to describe a country's set of social protection programs, these tend to operate independently with little or no...

The main goal of this paper is to draw lessons from the past to better understand the role and potential of social protection in response to crisis, and support the definition of the World Bank social protection and labor strategy 2012-2022. This paper uses selected crises (1990-present), their...