This paper examines the role of industrial and occupational segregation in explaining the gender wage gap and its evolution in Georgia between 2004 and 2015.
... See More + It first documents the declining trends observed in the gender wage gap in Georgia during this period, commenting on some of the possible underlying factors driving such trends. It then presents evidence that employment patterns by industry and occupations are highly concentrated in the country and measures the degree of segregation using the Duncan index. Next, it analyzes if and how much industrial and occupational segregation have contributed to the gender wage gap and its decline by decomposing the gender wage gap into the within-category and between-category components. The results point to existing gender wage gaps within sectors, industries, and occupations being the primary drivers of the wage gap in Georgia, and find a smaller role of gender segregation per se in these categories.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8583 SEP 13, 2018
This paper examines the role of industrial and occupational segregation in explaining the gender wage gap and its evolution in Georgia between 2004 and 2015.
... See More + It first documents the declining trends observed in the gender wage gap in Georgia during this period, commenting on some of the possible underlying factors driving such trends. It then presents evidence that employment patterns by industry and occupations are highly concentrated in the country and measures the degree of segregation using the Duncan index. Next, it analyzes if and how much industrial and occupational segregation have contributed to the gender wage gap and its decline by decomposing the gender wage gap into the within-category and between-category components. The results point to existing gender wage gaps within sectors, industries, and occupations being the primary driversof the wage gap in Georgia, and find a smaller role of gender segregation per se in these categories.
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Working Paper (Numbered Series) 131474 SEP 01, 2018
This poverty diagnostic documents changes in welfare and living standards in the West Bank and Gaza over the period 2011 to 2017. Since the last poverty assessment for these territories, in 2011, the economic constraints facing them have worsened.
... See More + The 2011 poverty assessment covered the period from 2004 to 2009, spanning the end of the second Intifada, as well as the 2007 internal divide in Gaza. The current diagnostic draws on the 2011 and 2017 Palestinian expenditure and consumption surveys (PECS) to assess key welfare trends and highlight areas for further investigation. The principal goal of this is to be timely and actionable, given the worsening outlook in the territories and the urgency of an effective response.
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Off-farm income constitutes a significant share of the household livelihood portfolios across Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the determinants and dynamics of individuals' participation in off-farm employment activities have not received adequate attention due to the weaknesses in individual-level data collection and the lack of longitudinal studies.
... See More + This paper uses national panel household survey data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda; provides empirical evidence on individual-level off-farm (wage and self) employment participation rates; analyzes the extent and drivers of entry into off-farm employment and continued employment; and conducts the analysis by gender and rural/urban location. A significant share of the rural and urban working-age individual population is found to participate in off-farm employment, ranging at the national level from 34 percent in Ethiopia to 58 percent in Malawi. Men participate in wage and self-employment to a significantly greater extent compared with women across time as well as within and across countries, apart from women's participation in non-farm enterprises being more common in Nigeria and Tanzania. The population weighted cross-country gender difference in off-farm employment stands at 9 percentage points, but this has declined over time in most countries. A substantial share of the population, amounting to about 39 million individuals across the five countries, is estimated to have entered and exited employment between 2010 and 2016, pointing to the dynamic nature of off-farm employment. Drivers of entry into off-farm employment and continued employment are country- and gender-specific, with demographic factors, occurrence of shocks, and job characteristics emerging as the most important determinants.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8540 AUG 06, 2018
The Gender Theme of the ABP II carries out comprehensive data - and evidence-based analyses on emerging challenges to gender equality and provides support to policy makers and innovative activities to address these challenges and increase women`s economic empowerment.
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The development objective of the Emergency Crisis Response Project for Yemen is to provide short-term employment and access to selected basic services to the most vulnerable; and preserve existing implementation capacity of two service delivery programs.The Second Additional Financing (AF2), the Emergency Cash Transfer Component (implemented by the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund -UNICEF) is also progressing well.The proposed second level restructuring is in response to a letter received from the Recipient and Implementing Agency UNICEF, dated June 27, 2018, and as documented and agreed with the World Bank during the implementation support mission of April/May 2018, requesting a reallocation of Grant proceeds between categories under the AF2.In order to allow for the utilization of the remaining balance to cover a third payment cycle to deliver benefits to beneficiaries, a reallocation of costs across subcomponents is required which would cover the cost of extending the engagement of service providers as well as UNICEF’s direct costsfor an additional six months.The proposed restructuring would be the third level 2 restructuring to be processed under this project (AF2).
... See More + A first and second restructuring were processed and approved in August 2017 and February 14, 2018 respectively and entailed a reallocation of proceeds among withdrawal categories.
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Youth in many low-income countries are entering the labor force in unprecedented numbers, yet many struggle to secure rewarding livelihoods. This paper outlines the economic development challenges that constrain youth's transition into employment, and it parses the evidence on which programs and policies appear to speed that transition.
... See More + It concludes that it may be time for a fundamental reassessment of approaches for addressing youth employment and the youth transition in low-income countries. Employment opportunities in low-income countries reflect the pace of economic and structural transformation. In designing strategies, policies, and programs to meet the entry-into-employment challenge for youth, the starting point is to diagnose the economy and current/future employment opportunities. Combined with the analysis of youth employment problems from a structural transformation perspective, evidence from rigorous evaluations of youth employment interventions provides new insight into which kinds of interventions are more likely to help youth succeed in certain contexts. The evidence reviewed here casts serious doubt on the efficacy and value of training interventions to help youth enter formal wage employment. The case is stronger for interventions that speed the transition to self-employment in farming or non-farm household enterprises. Support for development of transferable character skills and social integration among youth through positive youth development programs should be tested further for employment and earnings impacts, perhaps along with cash transfers to youth or access to finance. In reviewing the evidence on the cost-effectiveness and sustainability of youth employment impacts, the paper also notes the need for better measures of displacement and general equilibrium effects.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8500 JUN 28, 2018
Differences in earnings between male and female workers persist in developed and developing countries despite a narrowing of gender gaps in educational attainment over the past half-century.
... See More + This paper examines the gender wage gap in Vietnam and shows that a nontrivial part of the gap is associated with occupational sorting. The paper considers three explanations for why occupational sorting emerges. First, it explores whether women sort into occupations with better nonmonetary characteristics, such as paid leave and shorter hours. The data from Labor Force Surveys support this hypothesis. Second, it checks if occupational sorting among the adult labor force is driven by social norms about gender roles learned and internalized at an early age. To do so, the paper checks for evidence of sorting in the aspirations of 12-year-old children. Specifically, the analysis simulates what the gender wage gap would be if boys and girls pursued the occupations they aspired to at age 12, and the distribution of salaries remained unchanged. The paper does not find support for the hypothesis that gender norms drive occupational sorting by inducing aspirational sorting at an early age. Finally, for individuals with higher education, the paper checks if occupational sorting occurs during the school-to-work transition, when women face higher barriers in finding a job in their field of study. The analysis does not find evidence to support this last hypothesis. Overall, the findings suggest that in Vietnam gender-specific preferences for nonmonetary job characteristics play a key role in the emergence of occupational sorting.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8433 MAY 09, 2018
In Armenia, the proportion of women among employed workers increased from 45 to 48 percent between 2008 and 2015. This evolution was accompanied by a fall in the gender earnings gap; however, the difference in average wages of men and women is still among the largest in comparison with countries in the Europe and Central Asia region.
... See More + This study documents the gender wage gap in Armenia through stylized facts and further investigates its sources. The paper finds that the gender wage gap in hourly pay is 20 percent on average. Looking at the different percentiles, the disparity in wages in Armenia in 2015 shows an inverted U-shaped form with a larger differential in wages between men and women in the middle of the distribution. Using a reweighted, re-centered influence function decomposition, the analysis estimates the contribution of each covariate on the wage structure and composition effects along the wage distribution. The decomposition shows that the wage gap in Armenia is mostly driven by the wage structure effect (unexplained component), which accounts for almost all the wage gap in the middle part of the distribution (30th to 55th percentiles) and is even greater at the top, but better endowments of women offset it to some extent. In the bottom part of the distribution however, the composition effect is larger, consistent with lower endowments among women, for example, of skills and human capital.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8409 APR 17, 2018
