November 1999 - Unemployment in Sri Lanka is largely voluntary. The underlying problem is not a shortage of jobs but the artificial gap between good jobs and bad ones. Policy efforts should be aimed at reducing the gap between good and bad jobs by making product markets more competitive,...

In recent years, the number of surveys of access to and use of financial services has multiplied, but little is known about whether the data generated are comparable across countries, or within the same country over time. This paper reports results from a randomized experiment in Ghana to test...

This paper compares how results using various methods to construct asset indices match results using per capita expenditures. The analysis shows that inferences about inequalities in education, health care use, fertility, child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes are quite robust to the...