Single-party political systems exist in a number of countries, such as China and Viet Nam. In these countries, party membership is potentially an important source of economic and social status. This paper investigates these effects and the mechanisms behind them. In particular, we use household-...

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...

We conduct an incentive-theoretical analysis of political economy considerations in the design of social protection programmes in developing countries to accompany economic reforms. We focus on two aspects of social protection - the provision of redistribution and retraining - that arguably...

Expansion of social protection reach among workers in the large informal economy represents a persisting and thorny challenge in the development context. In Mainland Tanzania, several domestically led policy reforms have been introduced to increasingly expand social protection for informal...

In this paper, worker and job flows are estimated using the IRP5 data from the South African Revenue Services. The data used in this paper is from the 2011-14 tax years and contains information on more than 12 million individuals and nearly 300,000 firms. The main finding of the paper is that...

This paper builds on a longitudinal school-to-work transition phone survey experiment to quantify the effects on attrition of communicating with participants. Specifically, we study the impact of sending topically relevant information on job market conditions via SMS at the start of each survey...

We study the labour market dynamics of men and women in El Salvador and Nicaragua, focusing on the factors that help men and women move into an advantageous labour market state from an unfavourable state. We consider 'advantageous' states to be formal salaried employees and self-employed workers...

In this paper, we provide causal evidence of the impact of stringent lockdown policies on labour market outcomes at both the extensive and intensive margins, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict stay-at-home orders were issued and enforced...

Manufacturing industry expansion is a central part of Ethiopia's growth and transformation agenda due to its potential for accelerated economic development and large-scale job creation, in particular for women. However, the industry is experiencing extremely high labour turnover rates, which is...

We divide workers into six work statuses: formal self-employed, upper-tier informal self-employed, lower-tier informal self-employed, formal wage-employed, upper-tier informal wage-employed, and lower-tier informal wage-employed. In both Costa Rica and Nicaragua, earnings are highest for formal...