Over the last decade, significant global and regional forces including changes in technology, trade patterns, and business practices, with a steady shift in value added production and employment toward knowledge-intensive activities and services such as finance, the hospitality industry, and the...

Sub-Saharan Africa has the youngest population of any region of the world, and that growing working-age population represents a major opportunity to reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity. But the region’s workforce is the least skilled in the world, constraining economic prospects....

Skills and economic transformation in Africa -- Developing universal foundational skills in Sub-Saharan Africa -- Building skills for the school to work transition (technical, vocational education and training, tvet) -- Building skills for productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa through higher...

We study whether a particular socio-emotional skill - grit (the ability to sustain effort and interest towards long-term goals) - can be cultivated through a large-scale program, and how this affects student learning. Using a randomized control trial, we evaluate the first nationwide...

Front Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- About the Authors -- Abbreviations -- Executive Summary -- Policy Framework for Skills Investments in Sub-Saharan Africa -- Facing the Skills Balancing Act -- Focus on Foundational Skills -- Invest in the Technical Skills of Youth and...

Creating more and better jobs is arguably the most critical challenge to boosting shared prosperity in ECA. This report answers two questions: How can the countries create more jobs? Should there be specific policies to help workers access those jobs?. In answering them, the report examines the...

This paper employs recently developed econometric models of marginal treatment effects to analyze the relevance of labor market comparative advantage and segmentation in the participation and earnings performance of workers in formal and informal jobs in Argentina. A novel household data set on...