Using 2005 firm level data for 26 countries in Eastern and Central Europe, this paper estimates performance gaps between male and female-owned businesses, while controlling for location by industry and country. The findings show that female entrepreneurs have a significantly smaller scale of...

This paper provides a new definition of'time poverty'as working long hours and having no choice to do otherwise. An individual is time poor if he/she is working long hours and is also monetary poor, or would fall into monetary poverty if he/she were to reduce his/her working hours below a given...

Labor market statistics are critical for assessing and understanding economic development. In practice, widespread variation exists in how labor statistics are measured in household surveys in low-income countries. Little is known whether these differences have an effect on the labor statistics...

Child labor statistics are critical for assessing the extent and nature of child labor activities in developing countries. In practice, widespread variation exists in how childlabor is measured. Questionnaire modules vary across countries and within countries over time along several dimensions,...

A textbook provision program in Sierra Leone demonstrates how volatility in the flow of government-provided learning inputs to schools can induce storage of these inputs by school administrators to smooth future consumption. This process in turn leads to low current utilization of inputs for...

Do women weather economic shocks differently than men? The evidence shows this to be the case, especially in low-income countries. The first-round impacts of economic crises on women's employment should be particularly salient in the current downturn, since women have increased their...

This paper focuses on what determines labor redundancy in selected modes of transport (rails, ports, and buses) in six countries: Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, and Yugoslavia. It also analyzes different approaches for solving the problem, and concludes that analysis of the labor...

Globalization brings opportunities and pressures for domestic firms in emerging markets to innovate and improve their competitive position. Using data on firms in 27 transition economies, the authors test for the effects of globalization through the impact of increased competition and foreign...

Senegal is in a long-term economic crisis. Senegalese industry suffers from a highly adversarial system of industrial and labor relations, excessive government regulations in some areas and inadequate government support in others, and many misperceptions about the ethnically diverse labor force...