Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation?labor allocation and labor productivity?in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor allocation...

This paper examines how different types of workers in 17 middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Impacts on different types of workers varied by country and were only weakly related to the severity of the shock. Among active workers, youth...

This paper quantifies the magnitude of transitions across occupational categories in Colombia, a country with high unemployment and informality but quickly increasing its social security coverage for health. The analysis makes use of a panel of households between 2008 and 2009, representative of...

The European Social Survey data are used to analyze informal employment in 30 countries, focusing on employees without contracts and on informal self-employed workers (who are distinguished from formal workers). Overall the size of informal employment decreases from South to West to East to...

This paper presents the results of an attempt to use the combined results of the dedicated survey performed by CASE in 2007 and Polish LFS data in order to: (a) analyze the development of the shadow employment in Poland in years 2003-2008 and, (b) analyze the transition probabilities in and out...

This paper highlights the employment patterns of China's over-45 population and, for perspective, places them in the context of work and retirement patterns in Indonesia, Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom. As is common in many developing countries, China can be characterized as...

This note provides a general background of the main features of labor regulation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and benchmarks them against international best practices. The note compiles information on available labor laws and other legal acts concerning employment protection...

This paper investigates how enforcement of labor regulation affects firm size and other firm characteristics in Brazil. The authors explore firm level data on employment, capital, and output, city level data for economic city characteristics and new administrative data measuring enforcement of...

Sri Lanka's population is predicted to age vary fast during the next 50 years, bringing a slowdown of labor force growth and after 2030its contraction. Based on a 2006 representative survey of old people in Sri Lanka, the paper examines labor market consequences of this process, focusing on...

This study focuses on internationally accepted labor standards and norms governing the individual employment contract, including International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions and recommendations, European Union (EU) labor standards, and the European community social charter. The study also...