This paper identifies gaps in availability, access, and quality of household budget surveys in the Middle East and North Africa region used to measure monetary poverty and evaluates ways to fill these information gaps. Despite improving public access to household budget surveys, the availability...

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...

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 paper explores the link between the prevalence of violent conflicts and extremely low female labor force participation rates in South Asia. The Labor Force Surveys from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan are merged with the Global Terrorism Database to estimate the relationship...

Despite informality being the norm in conflict-affected countries, most estimates of the impact of conflict on economic activity rely on formal sector data. Using high-frequency data from Afghanistan, this paper assesses how surges in conflict intensity affect not only the formal sector, but...

This paper studies how a positive export shock -- the sharp increase in garment-sector exports that began at the end of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) -- spread through Bangladesh's labor markets. Although the end of the MFA was arguably exogenous to Bangladesh, the authors instrument export...

This paper studies employment patterns and trends in South Asia to shed light on determinants of extremely low female employment rates in the region. After a comprehensive literature review, the authors use employment data from about one hundred censuses and surveys from Afghanistan, Bangladesh,...

Mexico experienced a pronounced increase in the degree of inequality and earnings inequality over the 1980s and mid 1990s. Contrary to the trend in the distribution of total income inequality, there has been an improvement in the distribution of earnings inequality since 1996. This paper shows...

The authors follow the Hellerstein, Neumark, and Troske (1999) framework to estimate marginal productivity differentials and compare them with estimated relative wages. The analysis provides evidence on productivity and nonproductivity-based determinations of wages. Special emphasis is given to...