For more than a decade, South Africa has experienced falling labor force participation rates while maintaining relatively high unemployment rates, particularly among its youth. This paper examines the role of labor costs from the perspectives of employers and workers by combining information...

The latest push for industrialization in Ethiopia has attracted much academic and public interest. This paper assesses Ethiopia's competitiveness and attractiveness as an investment destination by comparing domestic productivity and input costs to a sample of manufacturing exporting countries....

"Informality" is a term used to describe the collection of firms, workers, and activities that operate outside the legal and regulatory systems. It is widespread in the majority of developing countries-in a typical developing economy, the informal sector produces about 35 percent of gross...

This paper examines public sector size and performance management in post-revolution Tunisia, drawing on macro-empirical, legal, and qualitative analyses. The paper first shows that public sector employment figures and the wage bill have increas

This paper discusses the impact of a gradual, pre-announced significant increase of the minimum wage during 2013-16 in Romania. The main finding is that the positive effects prevail when the starting level of increase in the minimum wage is very low and the economy is in a negative output gap....

This study examines whether jobs created as a result of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows can be considered to be good jobs both from the worker's and the country's perspective. For the worker, such jobs are likely to pay higher wages than jobs in indigenous firms in developing countries,...

The objective of this research is to provide analysis on the current skills ecosystem in Moldova. This assessment is based on interviews with private sector representatives, training providers and government representatives, and desk research. The report presents its findings on skills demand...

This report aims to provide policy makers in Albania with new evidence to inform the design and implementation of public policies on post-secondary education, vocational education and training (VET) system labor market information and intermediation, and labor policies. The STEP Employer Survey...

Online job vacancies from a Ukrainian website were explored to assess the skills that employers look for among their new hires. The demand for cognitive, socioemotional, and technical skills across a range of medium- and high-skilled occupations were assessed. Most employers highly demand all...

Morocco has steered significant resources towards large investments in economic sectors identified as strategic to growth, and for increased productivity and value addition. Despite Morocco's strikingly high investment rate, one of the highest in the world at an average of thirty-four percent of...