Disasters in Bangladesh and protests elsewhere have created an intense debate about the value, particularly to women, of apparel employment in developing countries. This paper focuses on how the forces of globalization, specifically the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), have affected women's wages...

Despite record economic growth for more than a decade, poverty has remained stubbornly high in Afghanistan, especially in the regions that suffered less from conflict. This paper aims to explain this paradox by combining a model of conflict intensity at the province level over period 2007-14...

Unlike social programs targeting individuals, few enterprise support programs have been rigorously evaluated, and existing evaluations have mostly been done in high-income countries such as the United States and Europe. Mexico spends a large share of government resources on small and medium...

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...

One of the key questions that arise in discussions of education decentralization, is how federal education resources should be allocated among the various states, and within states, among communities or schools. In general, there are two approaches: (1) bilateral negotiations between the federal...

In the past, research findings indicated that most of the differences in student learning were due to socioeconomic factors, and that, therefore, the effect of direct educational interventions to reduce learning inequality was very limited. However, the authors show that learning achievement...

Standard benefit-incidence analysis assumes that the subsidy, and quality of education services are the same for all income deciles. This strong assumption tends to minimize the distributional inequity at various education levels. Using a new approach, emphasizing marginal willingness to pay for...

After Mexico's financial crisis in 1994, the distribution of income, and labor earnings improved. Did inequality increase during the recession, as one would expect, since the rich have more ways to protect their assets than the poor do? After all, labor is poor people's only asset (the...

The end of the Multi-fiber Arrangement/Agreement on Textiles and Clothing in 2005 was a major policy change that affected the allocation of global apparel productions well as the lives of workers involved in this sector. Since the apparel industry is often the major female employer in developing...