This note analyzes whether and how the country's rising urbanization levels (measured primarily by population density) are associated with nonfarm job creation and poverty reduction. By focusing on Rwanda's 416 geographic sectors for the decade from 2002 and 2012, the analysis shows that,...

This policy note presents an analysis of and recommendations on the city competitiveness improvement and is part of a broader Philippines urbanization study. The analysis draws on the competitive city framework which includes four pillars: 1. institutions and regulations; 2. infrastructure and...

In low- and middle-income countries, scaling essential health interventions to achieve health development targets is constrained by the lack of skilled health professionals to deliver services. This paper takes a labor market approach to project future health workforce demand based on an...

Individual-level employment data have a wide range of applications. They are used to monitor labor markets and the Sustainable Development Goals, contribute to understanding and explaining socioeconomic conditions, and may help to design and inform labor market policies. This paper is relevant...

This paper offers for the first time a global picture of gender discrimination by the law as it affects women's economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades. Using the World Bank's newly extended Women, Business and the Law database, the paper documents...

In discussing the inordinately low employment of Indian women in urban areas, several studies have argued that culture and attitudes have created a labor market that is inherently discriminatory. The unsaid corollary is that culture is slow and hard to change and so, women will stay out of the...

This paper presents a new dataset of comparable employment indicators for South Asian countries, constructed from more than 60 primary data sources from 2001 to 2017. The main contribution of the paper is to curate the information provided by individual respondents to censuses and surveys, in a...

This paper investigates the relative importance of different channels in explaining the low share of industrial employment in Latin America relative to the economies that employ a large share of the workforce in industry. Differences in domestic final consumption shares play a pivotal role and...

This study surveys one of the critical welfare aspects of contemplating climate policies in developing countries and their potential effect on workers and labor markets. The existing body of evidence finds that climate policies will likely cause a significant reduction of jobs in fossil-fuel...

Most evaluations of public works programs in developing countries study their effects on poverty reduction and other labor market outcomes (job creation, earnings, and participation). However, very few look at other collateral effects, such as the incidence of violence. Between 2009 and 2014, El...