Changing population age structures are shaping the trajectories of development in many countries, bringing opportunities and challenges. While aging has been a matter of concern for upper-middle and high-income economies, rapid population growth is set to continue in the poorest countries over...

East and Southeast Asia face major demographic changes over the next few decades as many countries' labor forces will start to decline, while others will experience higher labor force growth as populations and participation rates increase. A well-managed labor migration strategy presents itself...

Internal labor migration rates in India have been largely static and low in recent times compared with those in other countries. This is a cause for concern because internal migration for economic reasons can promote the agglomeration of economic activity in more productive locations and...

This paper investigates whether social structure helps or hinders factor allocation using unusually rich data from The Gambia. Evidence indicates that land available for cultivation is allocated unequally across households; and that factor transfers are more common between neighbors, co-ethnics,...

In many regions of the world, the persistent, and growing, proportion of young people who are currently not in employment, education, or training is of global concern. This is no less true of Morocco: about 30 percent of the Moroccan population between ages 15 and 24 are currently not in...

This article investigates the causal relationship between women's schooling and fertility by exploiting variation generated by the removal of school fees in Ethiopia. The increase in schooling caused by the reform is identified using both geographic variation in the intensity of its impact and...

The author analyzes regional labor market disparities in transition by presenting some data and summarizing existing literature. He finds that large and persistent regional labor market disparities developed in virtually all transition countries and that there is some evidence of polarization....

Do matching frictions affect youth employment in developing countries? This paper studies a randomized controlled trial of job fairs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The job fairs match firms with a representative sample of young, educated job-seekers. The meetings at the fairs create very few jobs:...

This paper uses a unique dataset of both public and private sector primary school teachers and their students to present among the first estimates in a low-income country of (a) teacher effectiveness; (b) teacher value added (TVA) and its correlates; and (c) the link between TVA and teacher...

This paper offers evidence on the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment and informal employment, and identifies some of the lessons learned on the potential effects of increasing the minimum wage. Most of the evidence suggests that sizable increases in the minimum wage are...