The authors analyze the impact of privatization on the performance of 116 electric utilities in 10 Latin American countries. The analysis makes a number of contributions to the literature on changes in infrastructure ownership. First, this is the first systemic analysis of the impact of...

This paper analyzes the effects of monetary policy and fiscal adjustment on output and unemployment in Turkey. The model on which the analysis is based accounts for rural-urban migration, a large urban informal sector, flexible exchange rates, a dollarized banking system, and interactions...

This paper analyzes the role of labor market institutions in explaining the development of shadow economies in European countries. The analysis uses several alternative measures of the shadow sector, and examines the effects of labor institutions on the shadow sector in two specific regions: new...

The authors study firm dynamics using a novel database of all formally registered firms in Cote d'Ivoire from 1977 to 1997, which account for about 60 percent of gross domestic product. First, they examine entry and exit patterns and the role of new and exiting firms versus incumbents in job...

This paper examines the consequences of rapid disinflation for downward wage rigidities in two emerging countries, Brazil and Uruguay, relying on high quality matched employer-employee administrative data. Downward nominal wage rigidities are more important in Uruguay, while wage indexation is...

Economic transition in Bulgaria has been associated with the emergence of unemployment, the fall in real wages and a substantial increase in wage inequality. The ranks of low-paid workers have grown and their relative wage status has substantially deteriorated. Unemployment is of long duration....

This report examines the two most common programs that provide cash compensation to unemployed workers: unemployment insurance (UI) and unemployment assistance (UA). It compares them in two areas: costs and labor market disincentives. The cost analysis first derives a framework for examining...

This report examines unemployment protection with emphasis on three groups of countries: 1) OECD, 2) Central-East Europe and the Former Soviet Union; and 3) East and South Asia. Section 1 notes the presence of various public social protection programs including pensions, work injury insurance,...

Green growth policies confront firms and workers with adjustments that may create welfare costs for different segments of the population and cause reductions in near-term actual versus potential gross domestic product. There is little evidence on the cost of adjustment to climate change...

A vector autoregression model with time-varying coefficients is used to examine the evolution of wage cyclicality in four Latin American economies: Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, during the period 1980-2010. Wages are highly pro-cyclical in all countries up to the mid-1990s except in Chile....