The authors use the 1994 Living Standards Measurement Survey to show that the impact of labor market regulations, namely mandated benefits, is mitigated by reducing the base earnings on which they are calculated. Therefore, market regulation neither accounts for labor market segmentation nor for...

Privatizing, or restructuring state-owned enterprises, may lead to massive layoffs, but the number of redundant workers is usually unknown beforehand. The authors estimate labor redundancy by comparing employment levels across enterprises with different degrees of state ownership. In their...

With the transition in Estonia, worker flows increased greatly, driven by an increase in job flows. As the situation stabilized, the job and worker flows converged at rates similar to those observed in Western economies. In 1989, job reallocation accounted for only a small fraction of overall...

The author uses cross-country data from Latin America and OECD countries to test the predictions of a simple efficiency wage model (Krebs and Maloney 1998) about the share of the workforce in self-employment and the rate of labor turnover across the process of development and demographic...

The authors use a retrospective survey of 9,608 individuals, aged 16 to 75, to monitor the effects of Estonia's economic transition on wages and employment. Estonia is an interesting case because of its early adoption of relatively free labor market policies. Estonia's transition led to rapid...

The slowdown and possible reversal in the rural-to-urban flow of labor in Ghana is symptomatic of a basic shortcoming in the country's economic recovery: the inadequate growth of the productive sector in the non-agricultural economy. The rate of growth of GDP has been adequate but much of the...

Conducting cost-benefit analyses of health and safety regulations requires placing a dollar value on reductions in health risks, including the risk of death. In the United States, mortality risks are often valued using compensating-wage differentials. These differentials measure what a worker...

Unlike the well-developed literature on the employment impact of the minimum wage in industrial nations, very little is known about minimum wage effects in low income countries. Minimum wages increased sharply in Indonesia between 1990 and 1996 and by more in some provinces than in others....

There is increasing concern among policymakers that social security reforms that involve a transition to individual retirement savings accounts may exclude certain groups of workers from coverage against the risk of poverty in old age. While most public pay-as-you-go systems pool the risk of...

Exports of textile products originating from Sub-Saharan African countries have grown dramatically in the past decade. Recent trade initiatives, such as the"African Growth Opportunity Act"and"Everything but Arms,"along with low labor costs and improved integration into world markets, are giving...