China's price fluctuations increasingly exhibit significant structural characteristics, and since 2003, there have been several rounds of significant structural price rise. The degree of structural rise in the prices of industrial and agricultural products in China is not only higher than in the...

The new curriculum, new ideas and new requirements concerning English teaching have made the rural English teaching face unprecedented challenges. There are many problems contributing to the poor effect of rural English teaching, such as outdated teaching equipment, unreasonable curriculum...

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...

In the transition to a market economy, the Russian workforce underwent a wrenching period of change, with excess supply of some industrial skills coexisting with reports of skill shortages by many enterprises. This paper uses data from the Russia Competitiveness and Investment Climate Survey and...

The authors evaluated how Mexico's Labor Retraining Program (PROBECAT) affected unemployment and displaced workers. As part of the World Bank supported Manpower Training project, PROBECAT has provided short-term vocational training to more than 250,000 unemployed people. Their evaluation was...

This article analyzes the impact and effectiveness of the Mexican labor retraining program for unemployed and displaced workers--Programa de Becas de Capacitacion para Trabajadores (PROBECAT). The strategy followed is to compare the post-training labor market experiences of trainees with those...

In many economies, studies have found large wage differentials not accounted for by workforce characteristics, collective bargaining, or market power. Researchers attribute these differentials to either unobserved worker quality or pay incentives designed to elicit worker effort. This article...

The authors use panel firm-level data to study in-firm training in Mexican manufacturing in the 1990s, its determinants, and effects on productivity and wages. Over this decade, not only did the incidence of employer-provided training become more widespread among manufacturing enterprises, but a...

This book investigates trends in skills demand and supply over the past two decades for insights into ways to build (and use) the critical skills needed to sustain competitiveness of the Philippine economy. Part one of the book investigates trends in demand for skills in the country overall and...