India's manufacturing growth from 1989 to 2010 displays two intriguing properties: 1) a substantial fraction of absolute and net employment growth is concentrated in informal tradable industries, and 2) much of this growth is connected to the development of one-person establishments. This paper...

Promoting the smooth labor market integration and early labor market success of workers has increasingly become an important economic and social development aim globally. The Nepal government sees addressing the social and economic challenges of youth, and leveraging their social and economic...

Sri Lanka has shown remarkable persistence in low female labor force participation rates-at 36 percent from 2015 to 2017, compared with 75 percent for same-aged men-despite overall economic growth and poverty reduction over the past decade. The trend stands in contrast to the country's...

This study analyzes labor market performance in the Philippines from the perspective of workers' welfare. It argues that pervasive in-work poverty is the main challenge facing labor policy. Poverty is primarily due to low earning capacity of the poor and to their limited access to regular and...

The Employer Survey Snapshot features a descriptive analysis of the data collected during the first two waves of the Skills Towards Employment and Productivity (STEP) Employer Surveys. Key objectives of the Snapshot are (1) to explain the motivation and relevance behind the implementation of...

Governments around the world assign top priority to job creation and productivity growth. Developing the right skills among potential and actual workers not only makes capital and labor more productive, it also makes the adoption and invention of new technologies possible. Recent research also...

Female labor force participation (FLFP) in Indonesia lags behind other countries in the region and has remained more or less unchanged since 1990. Descriptive evidence by the same authors points to unmet childcare needs as one constraint on FLFP. In this paper, we provide the first estimates of...

This is a semi-annual report series on recent economic developments and economic policies in the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia). The report looks at the economic performance and outlook for the Western Balkans region and specific...

For a long time, the urbanization and development discourse has coincided with a focus on economic growth and big cities. Yet, much of the world's new urbanization is taking place in smaller urban entities (towns), and the composition of urbanization may well bear on the speed of poverty...