This paper discusses the role of labor market flexibility in economic adjustment during the 1970s and the 1980s decades in developing countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. In the first part of the paper it is argued that the success of the Asian countries to adjust to...

This paper provides new national accounts consistent poverty estimates for low-income countries. The paper compares the properties of the new estimates that are based on household survey means to existing World Bank estimates. The new estimates are used to reflect on recent controversies...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has lagged behind other regions in liberalization and economic reform during the past two decades. In this paper I argue that while socio-political and institutional factors may help explain the differences in the pace of economic reform between the...

This paper investigates the relation between female labor force participation rates and wage competitiveness in the MENA region. We offer a new explanation for MENA?s low female labor force participation rates based on the variation in average non-agricultural wages in different countries in the...

This article reviews the different methods of constructing multilateral output and productivity indices for agriculture in cross-country panel studies. We show that various multilateral output indices used by different researchers can have considerable disparities, thus rendering the comparison...

Since the 1980s, the majority of countries in the MENA region facing severe exchange shortages have had to adopt policies directed towards stabilization and structural adjustment of their economies. Employment expansion and the structure and function of labor markets in these economies has been...