In recent years, there has been renewed attention on policies to enhance the income generating capacity and productivity of the poor (World Bank, 2012).
... See More + Since both skills and capital can limit productive choices (Lucas, 1978; Banerjee and Newman, 1992), many programs specifically tackle those constraints to improve entry and returns to nonagricultural wage employment or self-employment. Yet the existing evidence base shows mixed results of such program. Even when they are positive, we do not know how sustainable the impacts are over time, especially once beneficiaries graduate from the programs. As such, substantial questions remain about how to design programs to increase skills and foster productive employment. A different set of policies aims to intervene earlier in the lifecycle and focuses on human capital accumulation during early childhood. Such interventions are often specifically motivated by their long-term potential to sustainable increase human capital, in part based on the Heckman (2008) hypothesis that ‘skills beget skills. Yet, except for a relatively small-n experiment of a parenting intervention in Jamaica (Gertler et al, 2004) evidence of long-term impacts of such programs in low- or middle-income settings is limited. This study hence contributes to various literatures by providing long-term evidence on the effectiveness of a productive safety nets program and an early childhood parenting intervention, targeted to the rural poor in a low-income setting.
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The study aims to provide insights to policy makers in measuring the impact of trade liberalization and regional integration measures on gender employment and wages.
... See More + The study incorporates gender-differentiated employment and wages for selected South Asian economies across sectors to identify targeted value chains and economic activities, particularly among green trade sectors. This is the first major attempt to develop a gender-differentiated data set for South Asian countries, within the widely used Global Trade Analysis Project framework, to examine the nexus between trade, green economy, and gender. Two illustrative scenarios are examined. The first scenario examines a complete tariff elimination among the Bhutan-Bangladesh-India-Nepal grouping of countries in all sectors. The second scenario involves complete tariff elimination among countries in South Asia. The results indicate that a free trade agreement signed by all countries is likely to be more beneficial compared with only some countries signing the free trade agreement. Women's employment grows faster than men's employment, as most of the sectors that benefit due to these free trade agreements are women intensive. Growth in women's employment and wages in South Asia is consistent with growth in green sectors.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9119 JAN 22, 2020
The creation of national middle classes and the changes in consumption patterns in many Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries suggest reconsidering the way welfare and consequently inequality is typically measured.
... See More + Using only consumption to measure welfare can lead to an important loss of information regarding the real welfare of the top 10-20 percent of the welfare distribution that is generally referred as 'middle class' in these countries. This paper proposes a method capable of correcting the middle-class part of the consumption distribution using information coming fromthe income distribution of the same surveys. Results from 6 SSA countries indicate an increase of about 20 percent in the Gini index.
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Using a cross-section of more than 29,000 manufacturing firms in 64 developing and emerging countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses whether trading firms have a female labor share premium relative to non-trading firms.
... See More + It focuses on four types of trading firms: exporters, importers, global value chain participants, and foreign firms. The study finds a female labor share premium for all four trading types, controlling for firm output, capital intensity, total factor productivity, and fixed effects. The findings also hold after controlling for differences in relative wages between men and women and excluding traditional export sectors (apparel and electronics) from the sample. The female labor share premium is much higher for production workers compared with non-production workers, implying that women specialize in low-skill production. In line with these findings, the study finds that the female labor share premium for exporters and global value chain participants is highest in low-tech sectors. And female ownership and management expand the female labor share premium for trading firms. Finally, the results suggest that although average wage rates are lower for firms with higher female labor shares, this negative correlation is smaller for trading firms.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9098 DEC 26, 2019
This paper analyzes the differential impact of migration on labor supply of the left-behind household members in Nepal, where international migration for employment, predominantly a male phenomenon, increased substantially between 2001 and 2011.
... See More + Using the Nepal Living Standard Survey data, the paper extends the analysis by incorporating the impacts on the extensive and intensive margins. The study also answer the question: if they are not wage-employed, in what activities are the remaining household members engaging instead? The paper finds that, in response to out-migration of some family members, women realign their priorities and reallocate their time from market employment to self-employment and home production, possibly filling in the roles vacated by the migrants. In contrast, the income effect dominates the impact of migration on the left-behind men; that is, men value their leisure more because of the remittances from abroad and decrease their overall supply of labor. Additionally, the research finds significant heterogeneity in the supply of labor by age, skill, and household head status among the left-behind women, pointing toward intrahousehold bargaining.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9014 SEP 16, 2019
