This paper contributes to the analysis of spatial poverty in Ecuador by deepening the understanding of the constraints faced by the poor in the country through an investigation of the role of portable characteristics (human capital) and geography in explaining welfare. At the national level, the...

The National School for Professional Technology Education (CONALEP) is Mexico's largest and oldest technical education system. CONALEP serves low-income students at the upper-secondary school level in Mexico. The labor market performance of CONALEP graduates has been evaluated four times in the...

Apparel is the largest labor-intensive manufacturing industry in South Asia, and is a major employer of women. Although South Asia's apparel sector benefits from many of the same favorable conditions as East Asia's, performance in South Asian apparel remains well below that of East Asia. The...

South Asia has a huge need to create more and better jobs for a growing population especially in the manufacturing industries where it is underperforming as compared to East Asia. The report examines three critical and relatively understudied drivers of competitiveness: -Economies of...

The U-shape theory argues that at early stages of development, countries experience a reduction in the female labor force participation, eventually followed by a recovery. In Morocco, female labor force participation is now lower than it was two decades ago due to several factors that are...

May 1999 - Roughly doubling the school resources allocated per student overcame a 30 percent deficit in test scores among rural students in Mexico's PARE program. Past research often attributed most differences in student learning to socioeconomic factors, implying that the potential for direct...

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), trade liberalization measures have coincided with stable economic growth, and GDP per capita growth has surpassed that of other developing regions. However, MENA's labor-market outcomes--such as average wage levels, informality rate, and female labor...

This paper focuses on how the forces of globalisation, specifically the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), have affected women's wages in the apparel sector in developing countries. Using household and labour force surveys from Cambodia and Sri Lanka, we find large positive wage premiums and a...

This paper explores the link between the prevalence of violent conflicts and extremely low female labor force participation rates (FLFPR) in South Asia. We merge Labor Force Surveys (LFSs) from Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka, India, and Pakistan to the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to estimate the...

This paper studies employment patterns and trends in South Asia to shed light on determinants of extremely low female employment rates in the region. After a comprehensive literature review, we use employment data from about one hundred censuses and surveys from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan,...