This book investigates trends in skills demand and supply over the past two decades for insights into ways to build (and use) the critical skills needed to sustain competitiveness of the Philippine economy. Part one of the book investigates trends in demand for skills in the country overall and...

While there have been numerous impact evaluations of unemployed individuals participating in retraining programs or in programs to foster self-employment, impact evaluations of enterprises benefiting from training programs for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are rare. The authors reevaluate...

This report was co-funded by research grant from the World Bank's research committee for a regional study evaluating Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Support Programs in Latin America and support from the poverty reduction and economic management division of the Latin America and Caribbean...

This paper evaluates small and medium enterprise (SME) support programs in Chile using a firm-level panel for the 1992-2006 period on two groups of firms a treatment group that participated in SME programs and a control group that did not. These unique panel data provide an unprecedented...

In the transition to a market economy, the Russian workforce underwent a wrenching period of change, with excess supply of some industrial skills coexisting with reports of skills shortages by many enterprises. This paper uses data from the Russia Competitiveness and Investment Climate Survey...

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises a new technological paradigm that can offer a number of innovative applications and services targeting different scopes of adoption. The full potential impact of the IoT is enormous due to its pervasive nature and the rapid improvement of enabling...

Purpose With the development of social productive forces and the advancement of agricultural practices since the founding of New China, the connotation of agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics has undergone a process from formation to continuous expansion and deepening....

This paper proposes a coherent multi-population approach to mortality forecasting for less developed countries. The majority of these countries have witnessed faster mortality declines among the young and the working age populations during the past few decades, whereas in the more developed...

Land is not only a basic factor of production and an important space carrier, but also a key tool to control the development of urban economy. While the phenomenon of land participation in regulation exists generally in China, the theory of supporting regulation and the effect of regulation are...

We construct a sovereign default network by employing high-dimensional vector autoregressions obtained by analyzing connectedness in sovereign credit default swap markets. We develop four measures of centrality, namely, degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centralities, to detect...