This study examines the relationship between growth and employment in Nigeria to gain insights into the country's paradox of high economic growth alongside rising poverty and inequality. The methodology adopted is the Shapley decomposition approach, complemented with econometric estimation of...

This paper examines the changing nature of occupational labour-market trends in South Africa and the resulting impact on wages. We observe high levels of demand for skilled labour that have intensified a trend already established before 1994. Over the period 2001-12 employment within the primary...

This paper seeks to identify the differentiated impacts of the crisis on specific groups of informal workers. The analysis draws on official nationally representative labour force surveys collected quarterly by South Africa's national statistical agency (Statistics South Africa). Based on an...

Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates, simulating incomes in prepandemic household...

Ghana's status as one of the African Lions is linked to the country's remarkable growth performance, which culminated in the attainment of lower middle-income status. However, employment response to growth has been weak. Additionally, growth has been accompanied by substantial reduction in...

Traditionally, analysts of the South African labour market have used household survey data to describe earnings and employment in the post-Apartheid period. More recently, administrative data from the South African Revenue Service has been made available, which allows for comparisons and an...

Across the world, people in urban rather than rural areas are more likely to support gender equality. To explain this global trend, this paper engages with geographically diverse literature and comparative rural-urban ethnographic research from Zambia. It argues that people living in...

We examine gender differences in ambitions and expectations of jobseekers concerning self-employment, an increasingly proposed option for youth in economies with limited wage employment. Analysing survey data on 2,036 tertiary graduates in Ghana, we find that males have a stronger preference for...

How have economic development, employment, and labour markets in Asian countries interacted since the publication of Myrdal's Asian Drama? Myrdal rejected, the western approach to and definition of employment and emphasized the role of "informal" employment, but he underestimated the effects of...