This paper discusses the impact of a gradual, pre-announced significant increase of the minimum wage during 2013-16 in Romania. The main finding is that the positive effects prevail when the starting level of increase in the minimum wage is very low and the economy is in a negative output gap....

The aim of this technical note is to shed some light on relationship between labor market institutions and labor market outcomes in the member states of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in North America and East Asia; the New Member States of the European Union who...

This is a semi-annual report series on recent economic developments and economic policies in the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia). The report looks at the economic performance and outlook for the Western Balkans region and specific...

Iraq needs a strategy to make rapid progress in tackling its profound jobs challenges. Iraq is facing a jobs crisis of unprecedented proportions. It could foment a resurgence in violence unless the Government of Iraq makes credible and swift progress in job creation and reconstruction. To shape...

This report stems from the work initiated in the Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) forUzbekistan in May 2016, which identified the quality of job creation as a central, cross-cuttingtheme. The SCD emphasized that "over the medium term, creating high-productivity, high-paying jobs for...

This paper provides early insights into the labor market impacts of the ongoing Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) crisis in Bangladesh, with a special focus on three especially vulnerable areas: poor areas in Dhaka and Chittagong City Corporations and Cox's Bazar district. The authors build on...

This note provides a general background of the main features of labor regulation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and benchmarks them against international best practices. The note compiles information on available labor laws and other legal acts concerning employment protection...

This paper uses administrative, survey, and online vacancy data to analyze the short-term labor market impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown in Greece. The analysis finds that flows into unemployment have not increased; instead, separations were lower than would have been expected given trends in...

This paper uses microsimulation techniques to quantify the potential ex-ante impacts of several minimum wage increases on labor market outcomes in Kosovo. The results show that the overall impacts of a minimum wage increase in the baseline scenario are likely to be modest, although the impacts...

Using census data for 1996, 2001 and 2007 the authors study the labor market effect of immigration in South Africa. In this period the share of foreign born over the total population has grown by almost fifty percent, and both the characteristics and geographical distribution of immigrants show...