This paper is aimed at identifying the sources of income insecurity and vulnerability among workers in the informal sector in developing countries and examines alternative approaches to social protection for the informal sector. This is followed by a discussion on the challenges of developing a...

Social protection can be defined as interventions intended to assist individuals, households, and communities in managing risk in order to reduce vulnerability, smooth consumption, and improve equity. Social protection in Togo has been put to test by the political and economic developments of...

Arguably, the most important public policy initiative underway today in the Dominican Republic is the reform of its social security programs. The reform is taking place in the context of an economic crisis that will make a complex implementation process even more difficult in the first few...

The trend toward including individual accounts as part of the mandatory pension system continues unabated. Nine Latin American countries have introduced individual accounts (Chile, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Bolivia, Mexico, El Salvador and Nicaragua) and several more are preparing to...

This"toolkit"provides quantitative tools to practitioners who want to undertake risk and vulnerability assessments using household data. While one could use price, exchange rate, and balance of payments data to examine macroeconomic shocks, and rainfall data to assess the severity of droughts...

This paper provides an overview of labor market trends, and key policy issues worldwide. It begins with a statistical overview of major indicators relating to the labor market, highlighting the diverging experiences between the high-income countries, and many developing regions. It then reviews...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the determinants of industry-level multifactor productivity growth. It focus on traditional factors, including the process of technological catch up, human capital and R&D as well as institutional factors affecting labor adjustment costs. The link...

This paper argues that it is important to take into account unfunded public pension liabilities as part of an assessment of the overall fiscal situation, including the fiscal positions of pension schemes pre and post reforms. It examines the concept of the implicit pension debt (IPD) and...

Unemployment insurance has been the subject of numerous theoretical and empirical studies. These studies elucidate the benefits and the cost of unemployment insurance, namely, the improved allocation of risk bearing and the reduced incentives for work. In the past two decades a branch of the...

In 1995, Latvia became the first country in Central and Eastern Europe to implement parametric reform of the Soviet-style PAYGO pension system, and the first in the world to implement the"notional defined contribution (NDC) system"originally designed for Sweden. The Government's intention was to...