Many governments have initiated public employment programs or expanded the existing ones in response to high unemployment. However, in many middle-income countries, a relatively large government coexists with persistently high unemployment. This paper explores the question of whether public...

Evidence that the automation of routine tasks has contributed to the polarization of labor markets hasbeen documented for many developed economies, but little is known about its incidence in developingeconomies. We propose a measure of the exposure to routinization-that is, the risk of the...

We present cross-country evidence on the impact of remittances on labor market outcomes.Remittances appear to have a strong impact on both labor supply and labor demand inrecipient countries. These effects are highly significant and greater in size than those offoreign direct investment or...

The aim of this paper is to analyze unemployment and labor market developments in Algeria and assess the factors that may hamper employment creation. The results of the paper suggest that the relative low output-employment elasticities and rigid labor market are the main factors behind the still...

The paper looks at the dynamics of employment in South Africa and examines the factors that contributed to the job-shedding observed during the recent financial crisis. The paper finds that the rapid growth of the real wage, which outpaced the labor productivity growth in most sectors, played an...

We estimate the elasticity of private-sector employment to non-oil GDP in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for GCC nationals and expatriates using a Seemingly Unrelated Error Correction (SUREC) model. Our results indicate that the employment response is lower for nationals, who have an...

Data and anecdotal evidence suggest that Japan is suffering from labor shortages, which are large in an international perspective, have a negative impact on potential growth, and reduce the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal stimulus. This paper focuses on policy options to ease Japan's labor...

This paper argues that the large differences among EU countries in post-crisis employment performance are to a large extent driven by the need to adjust corporate balance sheets, which had greatly deteriorated during the boom years in some countries but not in others. To close the large gaps...

Labor markets in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are characterized by high levels of informality and relatively rigid regulation. This paper shows that these two features are related and together make the speed of adjustment of employment to shocks slower, especially when regulations are...

This paper proposes a hidden state Markov model (HMM) that incorporates workers' unobserved labor market attachment into the analysis of labor market dynamics. Unlike previous literature, which typically assumes that a worker's observed labor force status follows a first-order Markov process,...