The movement of people in Southeast Asia is an issue of increasing importance. Workers move throughout Southeast Asia in search of economic opportunities.
... See More + This book highlights how mobility affects the well-being of workers, the constraints workers face when migrating for better opportunities, and the solutions to ease these constraints. The diversity of economic development in Southeast Asia means that there are ample opportunities for workers to seek out better jobs that pay higher wages. The book documents why workers are not always able to take advantage of these opportunities, what is lost when they are not able to take advantage of them, and potential policies that will expand their access to them. The report is structured as follows: part one gives migration and regional integration in Southeast Asia; and part two presents migration policy in Southeast Asia.
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This Migration and Development Brief reports global trends in migration and remittance flows, major policy developments, and the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators for reducing remittance costs and recruitment costs.
... See More + The Brief reports new data on recruitment costs, a potential indicator for the SDG of promoting safe and regular migration. The special focus of the Brief is return migration, currently a challenging issue globally following the increase in asylum seekers and undocumented migrants.
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Most Europe and Central Asia (ECA) economies are showing more rapid growth than previously expected, reflecting a strengthening of growth in industrial production and exports in recent months.
... See More + Export growth in the region continues to exceed that in the rest of the world. With the robust cyclical performance, countries are shifting their focus toward structural challenges that are part of the new normal after the financial crisis and the fall in commodity prices.Technological advancement, the globalization of production and work, and the challenges caused by lower commodity prices have contributed to a rise in public anxiety. It came to the surface as the number of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in the region rose, leading to concerns about immigration in general. Often lost in the current debate is the fact that the number of refugees in ECA is not unprecedented, that surges tend to be temporary, that refugees represent just a small share of the total number of migrants and that migration has long been vital to the region, with ECA economies reaping substantial benefits from cross-border labor mobility. Migration patterns are likely to change with technological progress and further cross border connectivity, and competition for high-quality jobs will become more intense. Reforms should help both migrants and non migrants cope with the inevitable increase in flexibility in labor markets—by, for example, ensuring the portability of benefits, increasing income security for workers, and better integrating migrants in host countries.
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This paper reviews anthropological literature on the topic of how and why civil services function as they do. The paper considers the formal and informal rules that structure bureaucratic practice, including the effects of institutional history or culture.
... See More + The review examines how bureaucrats understand or experience their work, such as the rules that guide them; the clients, bosses, or employees with whom they interact; and their own actions. Finally, the review considers what methodological or ethical challenges are posed by the study of bureaucracies. The first section explores normative expectations of organizational practice and how they shape scholars’ accounts of the nature of bureaucratic power. The second section focuses on bureaucratic decision making, scrutinizing how institutional goals manifest in specific practices. The third section considers how sociocultural structures bear on bureaucratic practice, including the question of how organizational history and culture might complicate efforts at institutional reform. The fourth section engages with questions of knowledge production, ignorance, and indeterminacy, reviewing recent literature that questions the presumed role of bureaucracies and states as producers of knowledge. The fifth section explores the conceptual and practical methodological challenges faced by field researchers at institutions, and points toward key areas for future research.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8081 MAY 31, 2017
The Dominican Republic has enjoyed one of the strongest growth rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) over the past 20 years. It also experiences high growth with limited poverty reduction.
... See More + The available evidence strongly supports the role of three distinguishing characteristics of the Dominican economy in explaining why prosperity has not been shared more broadly in a country that does not seem to have a growth problem. With this objective in mind, this book assembles a collection of empirical analyses that explore three complementary hypotheses that could help decipher the puzzle of growth with limited shared prosperity in the Dominican Republic. The analysis of three complementary hypotheses tested in this book yields interesting findings that reveal the complexity of the phenomenon of growth with limited poverty reduction in the Dominican Republic. This book is arranged as follows: (1) Chapter 1 addresses the adequacy of the methodology to measure price variation, focusing on whether the low responsiveness of the poverty rate to the strong, robust level of economic growth recorded by the Dominican Republic during the past decade may be partly explained by a price index that does not reflect differences in consumption patterns across income groups: (2) Chapter 2 examines the role of factor endowments, technology, and capital mobility in job creation, and investigates why in the face of outstanding growth performance, has the Dominican Republic not been able to generate enough formal jobs to absorb its abundant labor force; (3) Chapter 3 considers whether labor market outcomes in the Dominican Republic suffer from capital-biased technical change, providing additional insights into the questions addressed in the previous chapter; (4) Chapter 4 focuses on the wage effects of Haitian migration in the Dominican Republic, delving into the complex, sensitive debate on whether labor market outcomes in the Dominican Republic are affected by migrants from neighboring Haiti; and (5) Chapter 5 considers the labor market implications of immigration and emigration in the Dominican Republic, going one step further in this debate.
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