The 2008-09 economic crisis has had a long-lasting negative impact on the Mexican economy. This paper examines labor market dynamics in Mexico in light of the crisis. The labor market has been characterized in recent years by low relative unemployment, but high levels of informal jobs,...

This paper examines how different types of workers in seventeen middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Average employment growth slowed dramatically, particularly for wage and industrial sector workers, with corresponding increases in...

In Bhutan, the public sector is usually seen as the most desirable employer. This study asks if this can be attributed to public sector employees receiving higher wages than comparable private sector workers. To answer the question, the study combines an Oaxaca-type decomposition of wage...

Creating productive jobs is one of the greatest challenges in Ghana. This paper looks at job creation and its relationship with firm productivity and the quality of jobs among registered firms in the Ghanaian private sector, based on the 2013 World Bank Enterprise Survey. The study looks at the...

In most countries, the private sector owns the vast majority of the buildings and a considerable portion of the infrastructure at risk. However, most investment in disaster risk management is made by the public sector, with the private sector lagging far behind. The situation represents missed...

This study uses a randomized experiment to evaluate the impacts of the training and internship program piloted in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu counties by the Kenya Private Sector Alliance and the Government of Kenya with support from the World Bank?s Kenya Youth Empowerment Project. The program...

Over the past decade, there has been increased interest in improving business regulations, in part because of the increased availability of data that can inform and monitor those improvements. This paper analyzes whether these regulatory changes are linked to economic outcomes. With panel data...

Public sectors in the Pacific Islands are frequently described as being' too big' and as' crowding out' private sector economic activity. Reducing their size, it follows, would provide much-needed space for private sector expansion and result in higher levels of economic growth. This paper...

The quality of the public procurement system of an economy can have far-reaching effects on the private sector. This paper empirically explores several of these effects using two rich data sets. An overall indicator of public procurement quality is created from the World Bank?s Benchmarking...

The paper addresses the issue of the feasible level of private finance in a contracting model of infrastructure finding and financing. It characterizes the structure of financial contracts, deriving the conditions under which both public and private finance coexist. A key feature is that access...