Both Western and Soviet estimates of GNP growth in the USSR indicate that GNP per capita grew in every decade -- sometimes rapidly -- from 1928 to 1985. While this measure suggests that the standard of living improved in the USSR throughout this period, it is unclear whether this economic growth...

This paper defines informal sector employment and decomposes the difference in earnings distributions between formal and informal sector employees in Tajikistan for 2007. Using the quantile regression decomposition technique proposed by Machado and Mata (2005), we find a significant informal...

How is migration related to informal activities? They may be complementary since new migrants may have difficulty finding employment in formal work, so many of them end up informally employed. Alternatively, migration and informality may be substitutes since migrants' incomes in their new...

Women who want to work often face many more hurdles than men. This is true in Tajikistan where there is a large gender gap in labour force participation. We highlight the role of two factors - international migration and education - on the labour force participation decision and its gender gap....

This paper analyses the role of remittances and migration on the occupational outcomes of the household members left behind in Tajikistan. Using the control function approach, we show that, contrary to some existing evidence, there is no "dependency" effect of remittances. Our results show that...

We examine vulnerability to poverty in Tajikistan during the global financial crisis, focusing on the roles played by international migration and remittances, using a formal, practical, and easily decomposable vulnerability measure. Our strategy is to estimate a Markov transition probability...

We study the relationship between migration and children's education in Tajikistan – one of the poorest and most remittance-dependent economies in the world. The analysis of a unique three-wave household panel survey reveals that emigration of family members is negatively associated with...

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and 1992-96 Tajik civil war resulted in huge human and economic losses. Nevertheless, contemporary data suggest the persistence of investments in human capital in the region most affected by famine and least favoured since the cessation of hostilities,...

We examine how the forsaken schooling phenomenon in migration evolved over time in Tajikistan. After completing compulsory schooling at ages 16-17, young men in Tajikistan are forsaking professional education because of opportunities to migrate for higher paid low-skilled jobs in the Russian...

This paper presents and discusses new data on employment protection legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR - the CIS and Baltic states - over 25 years from 1985 to 2009. We use the OECD methodology (OECD EPL, version II) for assessing the strictness of national labor laws...