The economies of Latin America have undergone extensive reforms, raising concerns about how these changes have affected the labor market. But there is also increasing concern that the reforms may have deeper social ramifications as the new economies strain the ability of certain groups of men to...

Teams from two institutions studied the economic impact of health status on productivity and income. They studied whether onchocercal skin disease caused economic damage to the labor force at a coffee plantation in southwest Ethiopia, and how much. The research team estimated the daily wage...

Latvia has recorded sustained GDP and productivity growth since 1997. Yet unemployment rates, despite gradual decrease, have remained high. The paper explores the mysteries of unemployment in Latvia. It analyzes labor flows between employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation and finds the...

The objectives of this paper are : (i) to empirically probe on the validity of the hypothesis that wages are relatively unresponsive to labor market disequlibrium; and (ii) to investigate whether the dramatically diverse rates of unemployment observed across certain Latin American countries obey...

A major purpose of this essay is to provide an outline of the scope and nature of unemployment insurance (UI) programs in industrialized economies. This includes: (a) laying out their potential goals, including an analysis of the rationales for these goals; (b) summarizing the characteristics of...

Transition economies have introduced a range of OECD active labor market policies to combat unemployment - albeit often on paper only, as with rising unemployment passive policies have crowded out active ones. But even in the Czech Republic, active labor market policies have contributed only...

Sri Lanka has had double-digit unemployment rates for more than a decade.And by 1990, 85 percent of the unemployed had spent more than a year searching for a job. Rama analyzes whether high unemployment rates and long spells of unemployment are the result of profuse legislation of the labor...

Sri Lanka's high unemployment rate has been attributed to a mismatch of skills, to queuing for public sector jobs, and to stringent job security regulations. But the empirical evidence supporting these explanations is weak. The author takes a fresh look at the country's unemployment problem,...

Between 1990 and 1992 in Slovenia, recipients of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits tended to remain (formally) unemployed until their benefits expired, before taking a job. Institutional set-up suggests, and labor surveys show, that many of the recipients were actually working while...

One challenge in transition economies has been to avoid being caught between overrapid restructuring (harmful to the private sector) and gradual change (can undermine robust private sector emergence). Empirical evidence suggests thatin most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union,...