The paper examines the flow of workers between employment states, the role of education in these transitions and the impact of the transitions on earnings. It uses panel data for three waves (2005/06, 2009/10 and 2010/11) of household surveys in Uganda. Using the Markov chain process, we...

This paper focuses on the experience of using management and social science to empower the poor and build economic self-reliance among indigenous families in the informal economy of Africa. We describe a strategy which eventually became registered as a non-profit or NGO, Care for Life, and has...

The lingering policy dilemma facing many governments in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years is what can be done in the short to medium term to boost the output and incomes of individuals and enterprises in the informal sector, given the size and persistence of the sector in the region. In this...

This paper uses the case of Ghana to unpack the role of the informal sector in the process of structural change. A structuralist view of structural change - framed as changes in the employment shares of different industries - is combined with the insight that countries strive to diversify...

This paper uses the case of Ghana to unpack the role of the informal sector in the process of structural change. A structuralist view of structural change – framed as changes in the employment shares of different industries – is combined with the insight that countries strive to diversify...

We employ unique survey data collected in 2016 in two urban areas in Ghana – Accra and Tema – to examine gender and spatial gaps in sales and innovation. Multivariate decomposition analyses of the data uncover the following results: First, there is an unexplained spatial gap in sales between...

This paper explores the labor market returns to working on a victorious political campaign. Using unique administrative data from Brazil, we track the earnings and employment of campaign workers before and after close elections spanning nearly 20 years. We identify sizable returns to working for...

We are the first to provide a comparative empirical analysis of non-farm entrepreneurship in rural Africa, using the World Bank's unique LSMSISA dataset. This dataset covers six countries over the period 2005 to 2012. We find that rural enterprises tend to be small, informal household...

Although non-farm enterprises are ubiquitous in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, little is yet known about their productivity. In this paper we contribute to filling this gap by providing estimates of labor productivity in enterprises for Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. Using the World Bank's...

In this paper, we provide causal evidence of the immediate and near-term impact of stringent COVID-19 lockdown policies on employment outcomes, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict stay-at-home orders were issued and enforced in two...