Africa is a diverse continent. But is there a pattern to the diversity? Are there commonalities across the countries? And what does economics tell us about the diversity and the commonalities? The Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa is a definitive and comprehensive account of the key...

This paper attempts to investigate the impact of sectoral wage laws in South Africa. Specifically, we examine the impact of minimum wage laws promulgated in the Retail, Domestic work, Forestry, Security, and Taxi sectors using 15 waves of biannual Labour Force Survey data for the 2000-2007...

Minimum wage legislation is central in South African policy discourse, with both strong support and strong opposition. The validity of either position depends, however, on the effectiveness of minimum wage enforcement. Using detailed matching of occupational, sectoral and locational codes in the...

Assessments of the impact of minimum wages on labour market outcomes in Africa are relatively rare. In part this is because the data available do not permit adequate treatment of econometric issues that arise in such an assessment. This paper attempts to estimate the impact of the introduction...

This paper attempts to estimate the causal effect of government enforcement on compliance with minimum wages in South Africa, a country where considerable non-compliance exists. The number of labour inspectors per capita is used as a proxy for enforcement, whilst non-compliance is measured using...

This book is based on a conference entitled "Regional Public Goods and Regional Development Assistance", held in Washington, D.C. on November 6-7, 2002. It examines how the IDB and the ADB support the provision of regional public goods (RPGs) in Latin America and Asia, respectively. RPGs are...

This commentary poses a series of progressively harder questions in the economic analysis of growth, inequality and poverty. Starting with relatively straightforward analysis of the relationship between growth and inequality, the first-level hard questions arise when we ask what policies and...

This paper constructs and analyses a long run time series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late...