Public debate on the temporary employment services, or labour broker, sector in South Africa has focused on temporary workers' wages and benefits. Empirical research is limited: temporary employment services cannot be accurately identified in recent labour force surveys. In 2015, South Africa...

We examine the drivers of inequality change in Honduras between 1991-2007, trying to understand why inequality increased in Honduras until 2005, while it was falling in most other Latin American countries. Using annual household surveys, we document first rising inequality between 1991-2005,...

This paper estimates how private returns to education have evolved in the context of postconflict transformation in Mozambique. This has been characterized by rapid economic growth, significant expansion of the schooling system, but also limited structural change in a labour market dominated by...

A growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a simple method that takes advantage of both types...

Rapid urbanization is an important characteristic of African development and yet the structural transformation debate focuses on agriculture's relative merits without also considering the benefits from urban agglomeration. As a result, African governments are often provided conflicting...

Over the last fifteen years many African countries have experienced a "mining take-off". Mining activities have bifurcated into two sectors: large-scale, capital-intensive production generating the bulk of the exported minerals, and small-scale, labour-intensive artisanal mining, which, at...

In a 2017 UNU-WIDER project, 'Forced migration and inequality', one of us collaborated on a comparison of Afghan and Vietnamese refugee resettlement across four Western countries. In the light of the Taliban return to power in August 2021, we revisit the contributions of the Journal of Ethnic...

The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions through a feminist political economy lens and adopting a life-cycle approach...

How does conflict, displacement, and return shape trust, reconciliation, and community engagement? And what is the relative impact of exposure to violence on these indicators? In this paper we explore these questions by focusing on the legacies of armed conflict and the differences between those...

Gender gaps in labour force participation in developing countries persist despite income growth or structural change. We assess this persistence across economic geographies within countries, focusing on youth employment in off-farm wage jobs. We combine household survey data from 12 low- and...