The fraction of workers currently covered by minimum wages in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is small, but as formality and urbanization increase, wage regulation will become increasingly relevant. In this analysis, we find that higher minimum wage values are associated with higher levels of GDP per...

A central question for policy makers concerned with helping the poor through a macro crisis is how to target scarcer resources at a time of greater need. Technical arguments suggest that finer targeting through tightening individual programs or reallocation resources towards more tightly...

In the last two decades, across a range of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong distributional concerns that persist among populations and policy makers alike, despite the...

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration...

This paper attempts to investigate the impact of sectoral wage laws in South Africa. Specifically, we examine the impact of minimum wage laws promulgated in the Retail, Domestic work, Forestry, Security, and Taxi sectors using 15 waves of biannual Labour Force Survey data for the 2000-2007...

Minimum wage legislation is central in South African policy discourse, with both strong support and strong opposition. The validity of either position depends, however, on the effectiveness of minimum wage enforcement. Using detailed matching of occupational, sectoral and locational codes in the...

This paper attempts to estimate the causal effect of government enforcement on compliance with minimum wages in South Africa, a country where considerable non-compliance exists. The number of labour inspectors per capita is used as a proxy for enforcement, whilst non-compliance is measured using...

In the empirical literature on minimum wage enforcement, the standard approach is to measure the number of violations, not their depth. In this paper we present a family of violation indices which, by analogy with poverty indices, can emphasize the depth of violation to different degrees. The...