Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries


Book Description

"Employment and job creation are key components in achieving economic growth and sustainable development, particularly in low-income countries. The growing size of the working-age population in many developing regions underscores the need to further strengthen labour market structures in the world's poorest countries. Despite the importance of studying emerging labour markets, and investigating which policies are more successful, the evidence is rather limited. Against this backdrop, the joint IZA/FCDO Growth and Labour Markets in Low Income Countries (GLM|LIC) programme was established and has taken important steps to close this gap. Covering topics such as poverty, informality and rural labour, skills training and behaviour, gender inequality, youth and child labour, and migration, this volume presents key takeaways from most recent research in the field. Which development policies will work, which strategies will fail? The authors provide an in-depth discussion of current development programmes, based on the results of new evaluation studies, and derive important policy lessons"--Publisher's description.




Labour Markets in Low-income Countries


Book Description

'Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries' addresses some of the most important issues affecting labour markets in low-income countries. It builds heavily on the new research evidence that has been provided by the programme on Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries (GLM LIC), which was created as a partnership between UK Department for International Development (now part of the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office) and the German IZA- Institute of Labor Economics in 2011. Across nine chapters dealing with different aspects of labour markets in developing countries, David Lam and Ahmed Elsayed provide lessons about what kinds of labour market programmes and policies can make a difference. Some of these lessons are about the difficulties that many well-intentioned programmes face when they are implemented.




Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries


Book Description

Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries provides lessons about what kinds of labour market programmes and policies can improve prospects for growth and development in low-income countries.




Health Labor Market Analyses in Low- and Middle-Income Countries


Book Description

This book, produced jointly by the World Bank, the University of California, Berkeley, and the WHO, aims to provide decision-makers at sub-national, national, regional and global levels with additional insights into how to address their workforce challenges rather than describe them. In order to optimize and align HRH investments and develop targeted policy responses, a thorough understanding of unique, country-specific labor market dynamics and determinants of these dynamics is critical. Policies need to take into account the fact that workers are economic actors, responsive to different levels of compensation and opportunities to generate revenue found in different sub-labor markets. Policies need to take into account the behavioral characteristics of the individuals who provide health care, but also the individuals who consume health care services and the institutions that employ health personnel. In other words, it is necessary to understand the determinants of both the supply (numbers of health workers willing to work in the health sector) and the demand for health workers (resources available to hire health workers), how these interact, and how this interaction varies in different contexts. This interaction will determine the availability of health personnel, their distribution as well as their performance levels, thus ensuring stronger health systems capable to deliver universal health coverage. The book is structured to be of use to researchers, planners, and economists who are tasked with analyzing key areas of health labor markets, including overall labor market assessments as well as and more narrow and targeted analyses of demand and supply (including production and migration), performance, and remuneration of health workers. The chapters, written by a number of internationally renowned experts on Human Resources for Health, discuss data sources and empirical tools that can be used to assess health labor markets across high-, middle- or low-income countries, but draws primarily from examples and case-studies in LMICs.




Labour Markets, Poverty, and Development


Book Description

Recent years have seen a period of adjustment and structural change for most developing countries. The ongoing consequences of the debt crisis in the 1980s caused widespread concern of a serious deterioration in wage and employment conditions, as well as in poverty and income distribution. Although the outlook for developing countries changed for the better during the 1990s, concerns about the labour market have not subsided. This book takes a detailed look at employment trends in developing countries, bringing together a distinguished group of international academics and practitioners.




labor market policy in developing countries: a selective review of the literature and needs for the future


Book Description

Abstract: This paper presents a selective overview of the literature on modeling labor market policies in developing countries. It considers welfare economics, theoretical models, and empirical evidence to highlight the three general features needed in future research on labor market policy in developing countries. The author identifies desirable research components (welfare economics, theoretical modeling, and empirical modeling) and pitfalls in the literature (inappropriate use of productivity, reliance on wrong kinds of empirical studies, lack of cost-benefit analysis, attention to only a subset of the goods and bads, and fallacy of composition). The paper concludes with suggested topics and methods for future research. The author states that sound labor market policy requires sound labor market models. The paper makes a case for developing policy based on explicit evaluation criteria, specific theoretical models, and comprehensive empirical evidence.




The Labour Markets of Emerging Economies


Book Description

The past few decades have witnessed the economic and geopolitical rise of a number of large middle-income countries around the world. This volume focuses on the labour market situations, trends and regulations in these emerging economies.







Rural Wage Employment in Developing Countries


Book Description

There is a striking scarcity of work conducted on rural labour markets in the developing world, particularly in Africa. This book aims to fill this gap by bringing together a group of contributors who boast substantial field experience researching rural wage employment in various developing countries. It provides critical perspectives on mainstream approaches to rural/agrarian development, and analysis of agrarian change and rural transformations from a long-term perspective. This book challenges the notion that rural areas in low- and middle-income countries are dominated by self-employment. It purports that this conventional view is largely due to the application of conceptual frameworks and statistical conventions that are ill-equipped to capture labour market participation. The contributions in this book offer a variety of methodological lessons for the study of rural labour markets, focusing in particular on the use of mixed methods in micro-level field research, and more emphasis on capturing occupation multiplicity. The emphasis on context, history, and specific configurations of power relations affecting rural labour market outcomes are key and reoccurring features of this book. This analysis will help readers think about policy options to improve the quantity and quality of rural wage employment, their impact on the poorest rural people, and their political feasibility in each context.




Microeconomic Issues of Labor Markets in Developing Countries


Book Description

This paper deals with labor market structures in developing countries and the impact of government policies on rural and urban labor markets. The central concern in analyses of employment is absorption of labor. Governments try to influence the demand for labor so that more members of the labor force are absorbed into productive employment. Employment outcomes are often the by-products of government policies that affect economic growth as a whole. This paper concentrates on factors that influence the structure and functioning of labor markets. In Chapter 1, a schematic picture of labor markets is presented. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze the salient features of the workings of rural and urban labor markets and discuss some important government policies that affect the functioning of these markets. The paper concludes that Government intervention in both rural and urban labor markets has often been less than successful, sometimes because their policies were based on incorrect assumptions. At other times, these policies have achieved less because the government also adopted other policies that tended to contradict the goal of providing jobs.