The creation of job opportunities for the increasingly educated youth population is a major current policy challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, even though very little is known about the extent to which young workers in the region are satisfied with the employment they currently have. This paper...

In a polarised and highly unequal country such as South Africa, it is unlikely that a definition of the middle class that is based on an income threshold will adequately capture the political and social meanings of being middle class. We therefore propose a multi-dimensional definition, rooted...

The service sector is an avenue for economic transformation as not all countries have a competitive edge in manufacturing. The growing literature on service sector primarily focuses on its development in the US and Europe and on Asian emerging service economies like India. Not as much attention...

We use data from online job postings listed on a job board to study how the demand for jobs linked to new technologies during the COVID-19 crisis responded to pandemic mitigation policies. We classify job postings into a standard occupation classification, using text analytics, and we group...

Inequalities in the opportunity to obtain a good education in low-income countries are widely understood to be related to household resources and schooling quality. Yet, to date, most researchers have investigated the contributions of these two factors separately. This paper considers them...

Refugees are often perceived as an economic "burden", as the current debate on the European refugee crisis illustrates. But there is little quantitative evidence on the medium-term outcomes of refugees in the UK. We fill this gap by looking at the case of "East African Asians" who arrived as...

We study the effects of preschool attendance on children's school progression and cognitive skills in Kenya and Tanzania. Our analysis uses novel data from large-scale household surveys of children's literacy and numeracy skills, which also collect retrospective information on preschool...

This study addresses the measurement of two composite Lisbon strategy indices that quantifies the level and patterns of development for ranking countries. The first index is nonparametric labelled as Lisbon strategy index (LSI). It is composed of six components: general economics, employment,...

This paper investigates the feasibility of creating a common-currency union consisting of 16 countries in Southern Africa. We estimate an augmented-gravity model that includes public deficit, public debt, public expenditure, inflation, and the foreign reserves position. We also integrate...

This paper provides new evidence on the wage gap between informal and formal salary workers in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. We use rich datasets that allow us to define informality in a relatively comparable fashion across countries. We compute precise wage differentials by accounting for...