What happens when a previously uncovered labor market is regulated? We exploit the introduction of a minimum wage in South Africa and variation in the intensity of this law to identify increases in wages for domestic workers and no statistically significant effects on employment on the intensive...

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo offer a coherent vision for an economics of poverty and antipoverty policy. Their economics is grounded in an effort to understand the economic and psychological complexities in the lives of poor people, informed by social experiments and field observations....

Causal evidence on microcredit impacts informs theory, practice, and debates about its effectiveness as a development tool. The six randomized evaluations in this volume use a variety of sampling, data collection, experimental design, and econometric strategies to identify causal effects of...

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

Sustainable development cannot be achieved without a more equitable distribution of resources today and tomorrow. This paper highlights that prevailing inequalities are deeply gendered. Understanding this and making policy decisions towards reducing these inequalities is a key condition in...

Theoretically, the determinism represents a concept according to which the phenomena are generated by chains of causes and effects by conditionings and laws, by the necessary and repetitive interactions. As regards socio-economic determinism, it can be said that it shows the importance of the...

This paper uses two representative household budget surveys from the Kyrgyz Republic to analyze factors influencing participation and returns from different types of nonfarm activities in 2005 and 2006. Nonfarm activities are found to be most important for the poor, who are pushed out of...

Este documento presenta un diagnóstico de los aspectos demográficos, del mercado laboral y socio-económicos que influyen en la afiliación a la seguridad social de la población en el área rural. Aspectos como la baja escolaridad, los bajos ingresos, los altos niveles de informalidad y...

El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar una revisión de los principales cambios en la estructura ocupacional y las condiciones laborales de la fuerza de trabajo en las áreas rurales de México. A partir de la información de la Muestra del Censo General de Población y Vivienda del año 2000 y...

This paper examines the impact of the expansion of social protection programs on informality using the case of Mexico. A social protection system based on two components was created during the last decade in the country. The first is Seguro Popular which provides a minimum set of health benefits...