About a dozen countries in Latin America have enacted reforms that include elements being contemplated elsewhere, including the partial privatization of social security. It is not easy to draw universal lessons for social security reform from the experience of countries such as Argentina, Chile,...

Earmarking means taking all or a portion of total revenue from a tax or group of taxes and setting it aside or ‘protecting’ it for a designated expenditure purpose. Earmarking practices vary from ‘hard’ to ‘soft,’ and are associated with different levels of fiscal risk. At least 80,...

Recent changes in public employment in Brazil generate costs to workers that leave this sector. In this study we investigate the wage loss that leaving public employees may experience if they were absorbed by the private sector. Using microdata from the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de...

The region has been transformed by these developments, changing from a set of countries that rapidly integrated with the world to one that is also aggressively exploiting the sources of dynamism that lie within Asia. But countries in East Asia now face the domestic side-effects of rapid growth...

Today, Europe is a continent of low participation, low employment labor markets. Many observers would like to blame poor employment outcomes on the Euro or on austerity. But these are dangerous distractions from real problems that constitute imperatives for structural reform. There are...

The author uses the regional structure of the economy, proxied by the shares of services and industry in regional gross domestic product (GDP), as an indicator of the demand for educated workers. By examining whether the level of schooling as a function of shares of services and industry differs...