Technical education and training has been dramatically expanding in Brazil recently. However, there remains no evidence on the cost effectiveness of this alternative track to a more general education. This paper quantifies the wage returns of completing technical and vocational education and...

Large firms pay higher wages. In developing economies, the large-firm wage premium is comparable to the average gap between male and female wages, or two-thirds of the gap between urban and rural wages. There is substantial variation across countries in the share of the premium that is explained...

Using firm-level data for Georgia, the paper estimates the quasi-elasticity of employment and wages with respect to the share of exports in total sales, to explore whether changes in the structure of sales (exporting versus selling to the domestic market) matter for labor market outcomes. The...

The aim of this technical note is to shed some light on relationship between labor market institutions and labor market outcomes in the member states of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in North America and East Asia; the New Member States of the European Union who...

Experience shows that there is often ample room for more effective and efficient use of investment tax incentives in low-income countries. Tax incentives generally rank low in investment climate surveys in low-income countries, and there are many examples in which they are reported to be...

A large literature documents the positive influence of a city's skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city's age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research. This paper hypothesizes that cities with more...

Previous Poverty and Shared Prosperity reports have conveyed the difficult message that the world is not on track to meet the global goal of reducing extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. This edition brings the unwelcome news that COVID-19, along with conflict and climate change, has not merely...

Reforms spurred by accession to the European Union (EU) boosted productivity and integrated Romania into the EU economic space. Gross domestic product per capita rose from 30 percent of the EU average in 1995 to 59 percent in 2016. Today, over 70 percent of the country's exports go to the EU,...

This study investigates empirically the determinants of labor shares focusing on the role of investment and exchange rate volatility. The authors use a system GMM panel approach and consider 34 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries along with South Africa for...