The Government of Jordan has strengthened its commitment in recent years to gender equality and women's social and economic empowerment through Jordan's Renaissance Plan 2019-2020 and more recently through the preparation of the Women's Economic Empowerment Action Plan under the Mashreq Gender...

The provision and access to quality employment opportunities, especially for women and youth, is instrumental in achieving inclusive growth and more effective development outcomes. However, women and youth are particularly disadvantaged in the Sudanese labor market. Understanding gender- and...

The report is organized as follows. After a brief description of the analytical framing and methodology in section two, section three presents the history and demographics of the labor market in Sudan, focusing on indicators by gender and age across the three main sectors of employment:...

In this note, the authors explain that although Chile has made considerable progress in its efforts to reduce poverty, sustain growth, and promote democratization during the last decade, these advances, unusually, have been coupled with notable achievements in gender equality. Through the...

This note points out that the World Bank, jointly with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) developed the Program for the Improvement of Surveys and Measurement of Living Conditions in Latin America and...

This article highlights some of the findings from recent analytical work that has been carried out in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, notably a number of promising practices that are being developed to effectively address the infrastructure provision challenge, and in particular to...

After a period of strong support in the 1960s and 1970s, public funding for research and extension activities in LAC began to wane in the 1980s and 1990s. The strained economic context for many countries required the search for more cost-effective and efficient strategies for producing,...

The transition government initiated three important national processes: (i) multi-stakeholder roundtables or mesas de concertacion to support the Fight against Poverty, (ii) formulation of national development goals, and (iii) decentralization. The note discusses the actions that Peru has taken...

Since the early 1990s, the Bolivian government has begun a transition towards a more decentralized form of government. As a result, the country's 324 municipalities have greater autonomy and responsibilities and several social control mechanisms have been created to promote more participation in...

In December 2001, an unparalleled economic crisis unfolded, triggering high rates of unemployment and extreme poverty. Increases in informal and precarious employment, such as sub-standard jobs with low wages, reduced earnings in many households. GDP fell by 20 percent in the last four years and...