Some claim that certain forms of social protection, conditional cash transfers in particular, result in perverse incentives for recipients in order to stay eligible for receiving benefits. This notion has a bearing on the design of social protection programmes and may undermine the political...

Data on female labour force participation in Bangladesh suggest that, despite the increase in female-intensive employment opportunities through microfinance, export garment manufacturing, and community-based services, the majority of working women are concentrated in home-based activities. There...

Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers' preferences for jobs with social security coverage, I estimate that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that provides them with such coverage. A discrete...

This paper investigates progress in reducing the high level of racial stratification of occupations after apartheid in South Africa. Empirical analysis, using census microdata and Labour Force Surveys, does not provide strong evidence of sustained or significant desegregation. Occupations remain...

We extend the conventional framework for measuring segregation to consider stratification of occupations by gender, i.e. when women or men are predominantly segregated into low-paying jobs. For this, we propose to use concentration curves and indices. Our empirical analysis using this approach...

In this paper, I show that occupations in South Africa are segregated and stratified not only by race, but also by gender. While some women (mostly black and Coloured) overwhelmingly fill low-paying jobs, others (mostly white and Indian/Asian but also Coloured) tend to fill higher-paying...

Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labour markets of many low- and middle-income countries. A key issue in this regard concerns the extent to which informality itself is a persistent state. Using panel data from Ghana, South...

Contrary to the predictions of the insider-outsider model, we show that the large majority of outsiders in developing countries support, rather than oppose, protective labour regulations. This evidence holds across countries in different regions, across different types of protective labour...

Concerns about the dramatic rise in income inequality across the world and, at the same time, assessments of national progress on the Millennium Development Goals made it clear that it is the intersection of income inequality, marginalized social identities and, very often, locational...

This paper describes the very different role played by female elites in contemporary developing countries, as compared to the 'early' industrializing countries of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It shows that women are far more important in business and politics in today's developing...