Uganda’s economy underwent significant structural change in the 2000s whereby the share of non-tradable services in aggregate employment rose by about 7 percentage points at the expense of the production of tradable goods. The process also involved a 12-percentage-point shift in employment...

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the link from growth to jobs was tenuous in the first decade of the transition, giving rise to the notion of jobless growth. Yet, European countries suffered large job losses during the recent recession, suggesting that jobs and growth are closely entwined....

Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment, and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

This paper revisits the early empirical literature on economic growth in transition economies, with particular focus on fiscal policy variables-fiscal balance and the size of government. The baseline model uses a parsimonious specification, drawn from Fischer and Sahay (2000), of economic growth...

Drawing on the recent literature on economic institutions and the origins of economic development, the authors offer a political economy explanation of why institution building has varied so much across transition economies. They identify dependence on natural resources and the historical...

This paper examines the importance of fiscal autonomy in the analysis of decentralization. Using new data published by the OECD (2001 and 2002), it reproduces several indicators and proposes new measures of decentralization that take into consideration su-bnational governments' autonomy over...

This paper reviews city-based industrialization across Ethiopia to understand (a) its importance in driving net job creation, and (b) the factors that determine the success of high-growth industries and cities. The focus of the analysis is on firms, industries, and cities in Ethiopia that create...

Like many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Senegal has struggled to develop its industrial sector in the face of import competition. For basic food products, there is an implicit trade-off between the objectives of maintaining employment and lowering the cost of living, both of which figure...

This paper studies the role of public policy in promoting industrial transformation from an imitationbased, low-skill economy to an innovation-based, high-skill economy, where technological progress now occurs through the domestic invention of ideas. Industrial transformation is measured by...

The rise of China in the global economy has been linked with negative impacts on employment across many high- and middle-income countries. However, evidence for African countries is limited. This paper investigates the causal relationship between Chinese imports and manufacturing employment in...