Dracunculiasis (or Guinea worm disease) was endemic in several African countries as well as in India, Pakistan, and Yemen. The past decade, however, has seen a remarkable decline in the incidence of dracunculiasis as a result of the Global Dracunculiasis Eradication Campaign. The authors compare...

The author investigates the relationship between a firm's adoption of new manufacturing technology and its performance. A panel database that identifies technological adoption and tracks firms over time allows the use of different measures of firm performance-wages, productivity, net employment...

The author analyzes production and labor market data for a random selection of small to medium-size firms in Ethiopia to answer two questions: 1) Does a worker's marginal productivity increase with time in the labor market or with job security, as must be the case if on-the-job skill formation...

The empirical literature on the effects of ownership has not distinguished between the effects of ownership and the effects of control. It has also generally ignored the dynamic effects of various ownership and control rights. Using a rich set of panel data about changes in China's state-owned...

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...

In New Zealand in the next 50 years, an aging population is expected to elevate government liabilities and weaken the government's fiscal position. To maintain fiscal balance, the government must either substantially pre-fund future increases in its liabilities or significantly raise taxes in...

A long tradition sees the small firm sector as a holding pattern for workers queuing for jobs in the formal sector of a segmented labor market. An alternative"entrepreneurial"view suggests that many workers prefer self-employment to salaried jobs. These competing views can be resolved if the...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series Numbers 2197-2261.

The authors examine technical efficiency variation across four industrial sectors in India, using a stochastic production frontier technique. The results are comparable to technical efficiency distribution patterns obtained in other countries. The authors examine heterogeneity in firm-level...

This paper argues that the labor transfer process outlined by the Lewis model (1954) can give rise to surplus labour - in the sense than the marginal product of labour is less that the wage - in the public part of the modern sector and that this may deprive the modern sector of its dynamism....