03. Journals

2,963 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210

These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 33

Assessing Gender Gaps in Employment and Earnings in Africa: The Case of Eswatini

(Taylor and Francis, 2021-07) Brixiova Schwidrowski, Zuzana ; Imai, Susumu ; Kangoye, Thierry ; Yameogo, Nadege Desiree

Persistent gender gaps characterize labor markets in many African countries. Utilizing Eswatini’s first three labor market surveys (conducted in 2007, 2010, and 2013), this paper provides first systematic evidence on the country’s gender gaps in employment and earnings. We find that women have notably lower employment rates and earnings than men, even though the global financial crisis had a less negative impact on women than it had on men. Both unadjusted and unexplained gender earnings gaps are higher in self-employment than in wage employment. Tertiary education and urban location account for a large part of the gender earnings gap and mitigate high female propensity to self-employment. Our findings suggest that policies supporting female higher education and rural-urban mobility could reduce persistent inequalities in Eswatini’s labor market outcomes as well as in other middle-income countries in southern Africa.
Migration and Urbanization in Post-Apartheid South Africa

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06) Bakker, Jan David ; Parsons, Christopher ; Rauch, Ferdinand

Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, little is known about the process of urbanization across the continent. This paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population shocks affect the spatial distribution of economic activity. Under apartheid, black South Africans were severely restricted in their choice of location, and many were forced to live in homelands. Following the abolition of apartheid they were free to migrate. Given a migration cost in distance, a town nearer to the homelands will receive a larger inflow of people than a more distant town following the removal of mobility restrictions. Drawing upon this exogenous variation, this study examines the effect of migration on urbanization in South Africa. While it is found that on average there is no endogenous adjustment of population location to a positive population shock, there is heterogeneity in the results. Cities that start off larger do grow endogenously in the wake of a migration shock, while rural areas that start off small do not respond in the same way. This heterogeneity indicates that population shocks lead to an increase in urban relative to rural populations. Overall, the evidence suggests that exogenous migration shocks can foster urbanization in the medium run.
Economic Transformation in Africa from the Bottom Up: New Evidence from Tanzania

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02) Diao, Xinshen ; Kweka, Josaphat ; McMillan, Margaret ; Qureshi, Zara

Tanzania's rapid labor productivity growth has been accompanied by a proliferation of small, largely informal firms. Using Tanzania's first nationally representative survey of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs)—this paper explores the nature of these businesses. It finds that these firms are located in both rural and urban areas and that they operate primarily in trade services and manufacturing. Roughly half of all business owners say they would not leave their job for a full-time salaried position. Fifteen percent of these small businesses contribute significantly to economy-wide labor productivity. The most important policy implication of the evidence presented in this paper is that if the goal is to grow MSMEs with the potential to contribute to productive employment, policies must be targeted at the most promising firms.
How to Target Households in Adaptive Social Protection Systems? Evidence from Humanitarian and Development Approaches in Niger

(Taylor and Francis, 2019-12-06) Schnitzer, Pascale

The methods used to identify the beneficiaries of programs aiming to address persistent poverty and shocks are subject to frequent policy debates. Relying on panel data from Niger, this report simulates the performance of various targeting methods that are widely used by development and humanitarian actors. The methods include proxy-means testing (PMT), household economy analysis (HEA), geographical targeting, and combined methods. Results show that PMT performs more effectively in identifying persistently poor households, while HEA shows superior performance in identifying transiently food insecure households. Geographical targeting is particularly efficient in responding to food crises, which tend to be largely covariate. Combinations of geographical, PMT, and HEA approaches may be used as part of an efficient and scalable adaptive social protection system. Results motivate the consolidation of data across programs, which can support the application of alternative targeting methods tailored to program-specific objectives.
Decomposing the Labour Productivity Gap between Migrant-Owned and Native-Owned Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa

(Taylor and Francis, 2018-09-18) Islam, Asif ; Palacios Lopez, Amparo ; Amin, Mohammad

Migration studies have been primarily based on the movement of individuals from developing to developed economies, with a focus on the impact of migrants on host country wages. In this study we take a different angle by exploring the labor productivity of migrant-owned firms versus native-owned firms in 20 African economies using firm-level data. We find that labor productivity is 78 per cent higher in migrant-owned firms than native-owned firms. Using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method we find that structural effects account for 80 per cent of the labor productivity gap. Returns to manager education largely explain the productivity advantage of migrant-owned firms over native-owned firms. Interactions with the government, access to finance, informality, and power outages are also considerable contributors to the labor productivity gap.
Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask?

(Elsevier, 2017-10) Serneels, Pieter ; Beegle, Kathleen ; Dillon, Andrew

Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates these returns, often carefully addressing issues such as selection into wage employment and endogeneity in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less exploration of whether the estimates of Mincerian returns depend on how information about wage work is collected. Relying on a survey experiment in Tanzania, this paper finds that estimates of the returns to education vary by questionnaire design, but not by whether the information on employment and wages is self-reported or collected by a proxy respondent. The differences derived from questionnaire type are substantial, varying from higher returns of 5 percentage points among the most well educated men to 16 percentage points among the least well educated women. These differences are at magnitudes similar to the bias in ordinary least squares estimation, which receives considerable attention in the literature. The findings demonstrate that survey design matters in the estimation of returns to schooling and that care is needed in comparing across contexts and over time, particularly if the data are generated through different surveys.
Teaching Personal Initiative Beats Traditional Training in Boosting Small Business in West Africa

(American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2017-09-22) Campos, Francisco ; Frese, Michael ; Goldstein, Markus ; Iacovone, Leonardo ; Johnson, Hillary C. ; McKenzie, David ; Mensmann, Mona

Standard business training programs aim to boost the incomes of the millions of self-employed business owners in developing countries by teaching basic financial and marketing practices, yet the impacts of such programs are mixed. We tested whether a psychology-based personal initiative training approach, which teaches a proactive mindset and focuses on entrepreneurial behaviors, could have more success. A randomized controlled trial in Togo assigned microenterprise owners to a control group (n = 500), a leading business training program (n = 500), or a personal initiative training program (n = 500). Four follow-up surveys tracked outcomes for firms over 2 years and showed that personal initiative training increased firm profits by 30%, compared with a statistically insignificant 11% for traditional training. The training is cost-effective, paying for itself within 1 year. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science Vol 357, issue 6357: 1287-90.
Direct and Indirect Effects of Malawi's Public Works Program on Food Security

(Elsevier, 2017-09) Beegle, Kathleen ; Galasso, Emanuela ; Goldberg, Jessica

Labor-intensive public works programs are important social protection tools in low-income settings, intended to supplement the income of poor households and improve public infrastructure. In this evaluation of the Malawi Social Action Fund, an at-scale, government-operated program, across- and within-village randomization is used to estimate effects on food security and use of fertilizer. There is no evidence that the program improves food security and suggestive evidence of negative spillovers to untreated households. These disappointing results hold even under modifications to the design of the program to offer work during the lean rather than harvest season or increase the frequency of payments. These findings stand in contrast to those from large public works programs in India and Ethiopia, and serves as a reminder that public works programs will not always have significant and measurable welfare effects.
The Changing Structure of Africa’s Economies

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2017-06-01) Diao, Xinshen ; Harttgen, Kenneth ; McMillan, Margaret

Using data from the Groningen Growth and Development Center’s Africa Sector Database and the Demographic and Health Surveys, we show that much of Africa’s recent growth and poverty reduction has been associated with a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline is most pronounced for rural females over the age of 25 who have a primary education; it has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity services and manufacturing. We also show that, although the employment share in manufacturing is not expanding rapidly, in most of the low-income African countries the employment share in manufacturing has not peaked and is still expanding, albeit from very low levels. More work is needed to understand the implications of these shifts in employment shares for future growth and development in Africa south of the Sahara.
Minimum Wages in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Primer

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2017-02) Bhorat, Haroon ; Kanbur, Ravi ; Stanwix, Benjamin

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 capita, in both SSA and non-SSA countries. Using two measures to assess the level at which minimum wages are set, we find that minimum wages in SSA countries are on average lower—relative to average wages—than most other comparable regions of the world. Thus, SSA as a whole reflects no particular bias toward a comparatively more pro–minimum wage policy. Within SSA, however, we observe that low-income countries set relatively higher minimum wages than middle- or upper-income countries. We find significant variation in the detail of minimum wage regimes and schedules in the region, as well as large variations in compliance. Notably, several countries in SSA have relatively complex minimum wage schedules, and on average we find high levels of noncompliance among covered workers. We also summarize the limited research on the employment effects of minimum wages in SSA, which are consistent with global results. By and large, introducing and raising the minimum wage appears to have small negative employment impacts or no statistically significant negative impacts. There are country studies, however, where substantial negative effects on employment are reported—often for specific cohorts. The release of country-level earnings and employment data at regular intervals lies at the heart of a more substantive, country-focused minimum wage research agenda for Africa.