There is now widespread recognition that in most countries, private-sector investment has not been able to absorb surplus labor. This is all the more the case for poor unskilled people. Public works programs and employment guarantee schemes in South Africa, India, and other countries provide...

Widespread economic recessions and protracted financial crises have been documented as setting back gender equality and other development goals in the past. In the midst of the current global crisisoften referred to as the Great Recession"there is grave concern that progress made in poverty...

This paper considers public employment guarantee programs in the context of South Africa as a means to address the nexus of poverty, unemployment, and unpaid work burdensall factors exacerbated by HIV/AIDS. It further discusses the need for genderinformed public job creation in areas that...

As country after country in the European Union is called to respond to the current challenge of our time - high inflation and declining real wages - governments must engage in a transformative agenda and go beyond emergency energy vouchers and income support cashtransfers. And if the goal is to...

This paper demonstrates the strong impacts that public job creation in social care provisioning has on employment creation. Furthermore, it shows that mobilizing underutilized domestic labor resources and targeting them to bridge gaps in community-based services yield strong pro-poor income...

The number of workers who hold more than one job (a.k.a. multiple jobholders) has increased recently in Canada. While this seems to echo the view that non-standard work arrangements are becoming pervasive, the increase has in fact been trivial compared with the long-run rise of multiple...

Most macroeconomic data are uncertain - they are estimates rather than perfect measures of underlying economic variables. One symptom of that uncertainty is the propensity of statistical agencies to revise their estimates in the light of new information or methodological advances. This paper...

This paper proposes a new panel model of cross-sectional dependence. The model has a number of potential structural interpretations that relate to economic phenomena such as herding in financial markets. On an econometric level it provides a flexible approach to the modelling of interactions...

The investigation of the presence of structural change in economic and financial series is a major preoccupation in econometrics. A number of tests have been developed and used to explore the stationarity properties of various processes. Most of the focus has rested on the first two moments of a...

In this paper we explore the consequences for forecasting of the following two facts: first, that over time statistical agencies revise and improve published data, so that observations on more recent events are those that are least well measured. Second, that economies are such that observations...