We analyse the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown on a sample of women who completed their undergraduate degrees from public colleges in Lahore, Pakistan. We conducted phone surveys with 1,617 women from May to June 2020 collecting information on their own and household outcomes. Pakistan imposed a strict lockdown in March 2020, following the first recorded death in the country in the same month. We survey the respondents, on average, 10 weeks after the lockdown was first implemented, when it was beginning to be eased. The country was implementing a policy of ‘smart lockdown’, imposing stricter safety and social distancing protocols in localized areas that were deemed to have high or rising infection rates. We interviewed women belonging to urban, middle class households in Lahore. Our sample is unique in that they are highly educated – all of the women in our sample are recent college graduates when only about 10% of the women in urban areas of Pakistan have an undergraduate or higher degree. This research is part of the G2LM Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries programme.

We designed and randomized a mentorship program among students undergoing school-to-work transitions in Uganda. The program improved participants’ career trajectories up to a year after graduation. Using call transcripts and survey data, we find that the mentorship acted by providing information about entry-level jobs and encouragement, rather than job referrals or search capital. Consistent with this finding, mentored students lowered their reservation wages, raised their expected returns to experience, and turned down fewer job offers. These results highlight the role of distorted beliefs in prolonging youth unemployment and point to a cost-effective and scalable solution. This research is part of the G2LM Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries programme.

This study investigates the role of trade networks in the dissemination and amplification of economic shocks using the 2020 Ethiopian civil war as a quasi-natural experiment. It uses Value-added Tax (VAT) data from the Ethiopian Revenue and Customs Authority (ERCA) to construct a detailed network of firm level supplier-buyer connections. Using a difference-indifferences strategy, it finds a significant negative impact of conflict exposure on firms located outside the conflict area. This paper is part of the Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries (PEDL) programme.

Recent growth accelerations in Africa are characterized by declining shares of the labour force employed in agriculture, increasing labour productivity in agriculture, and declining labour productivity in modern sectors such as manufacturing. To shed light on this puzzle, this study disaggregate firms in the manufacturing sector by average size using two newly created firm level panels covering Tanzania (2008-2016) and Ethiopia (1996-2017). It identifies a dichotomy between larger firms with superior productivity performance that do not expand employment and small firms that absorb employment but do not experience much productivity growth. Large, more productive firms use highly capital-intensive techniques, in line with global technology trends but significantly greater than what would be expected based on these countries’ income levels or relative factor endowments. This article is part of the Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries (PEDL) programme.

In Nigeria, informality has been on a persistent rise with an increasing number of people engaging in informal employment. Similarly, the rate of poverty and extreme poverty in the country has also been on the rise, an occurrence more evident among the working poor. However, not much is known empirically about the dynamics of both informality and poverty within the Nigerian context. Using panel data from the four waves of the Nigeria General Household Survey (GHS), this study employs the random effects panel regression model to assess the poverty implications of mobility across informal employment types, while also exploring the dynamics of informality and poverty, respectively. The results of our analysis indicate that although work is important, the quality of the work is much more crucial for the welfare of those engaged. Specifically, we find that whereas, transition between all forms of employment is negatively associated with poverty, household heads who transition from formal to informal employment are 0.8 times less likely to move above the poverty line than those who remain in formal employment. Our findings also show that persistence in informality in the country is more evident among own-account workers. This research is part of the G2LM Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries programme.

Individuals’ socio-emotional skills (SES), and their perceptions of their skill levels, matter for labour market outcomes and other welfare outcomes. Men appear to have higher levels of SES than women, but this gender gap is typically documented in self-reported measures. Few studies use measures beyond self-reports or seek to measure SES granularly and rigorously in large samples, especially in low- and middle-income countries. This paper deploys novel sets of self-reported and behavioural measures of 14 SES in a sample of more than 4,000 male and female youth not in full-time education, employment or training, in urban and peri-urban Tanzania. The findings show that men score higher than women on all 12 positively-worded self-reported measures. In contrast, gender gaps in behavioural measures are only observed for a few skills, and are far smaller in magnitude. The paper provides suggestive evidence that this pattern reflects men’s overestimation of their own skills, rather than women’s underestimation. In particular, there is a larger gap between self-reported and behavioural measures among men. Men’s self-reports, and the gap between their self-reported and behavioural measures, are strongly correlated with measures of their social desirability and gendered beliefs about abilities but this does not hold for women. This is output of Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) programme.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic ruthlessly affected almost all aspects of human life, the industrial sector as well. Despite the severe effects of the pandemic on large-scale firms, the intensity of the impacts on them has not been uniform; different firms have been affected to different degrees. Using data enumerated from 102 large-scale firms in Nepal, this study has assessed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on large-scale firms and identified the factors moderating its impact on large-scale firms. The study revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic had negative impacts on the production, sales, and profit of large-scale firms in Nepal. The study disclosed that the age, sex, educational qualification, work experience, managerial skills and managerial foresight of the managers or higher authorities, age of the firm, total capital, type of ownership and sector of firms were the key factors moderating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the large-scale firms. This article is part of the Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries (PEDL) programme.

The role of trade unions in the Cameroonian labour market is still a little discussed topic, despite the end of trade union monolithism in 1995 and the emergence of collective agreements that have been genuinely negotiated between the social partners since 2000. Using only the second Survey on Employment and the Informal Sector (EESI), due to the unavailability to the public of data from the third wave of this survey at the time of writing, conducted by the National Institute of Statistics in 2010, this paper assesses the influence of union presence and union membership on the monthly earnings of formal and informal sector employees, highlighting the specificities of the Cameroonian industrial relations system. The empirical results, which are mainly based on the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator, show that the presence of a trade union and/or a staff representative in a workplace has a positive and significant influence on income, except in the public sector. When the analysis is restricted to workplaces where there is at least one union, the results reveal that union membership is not an explanatory factor for the average earnings gap between union and non-union employees in the informal and public sectors. In the formal private sector, however, union members are paid less than their non-union counterparts. This research is part of the G2LM Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries programme.

Decision-making is often used as a proxy for agency, the ability to set goals and act on them, although there are several theoretical critiques of this approach. Using unique data from the rural Philippines, this paper empirically tests the extent to which different aspects of decision-making are correlated with the Relative Autonomy Index (RAI), a measure of agency that has been validated for use in lower-income countries. Being a decision-maker (as asked in common survey questions) is only weakly related to the Relative Autonomy Index for women, and not at all for men. Having input into decisions and, to a greater extent, the ability to make personal decisions if desired are strongly associated with the RAI for both genders. The quantitative and qualitative data indicate that these concepts better capture the ability to make choices in line with one’s personal goals, while being a decision-maker instead reflects being responsible for the outcome or managing the execution of a task, often in the face of limited options. The findings caution against focusing on being a decision-maker as a sole indicator of agency and have practical implications for both conceptualizing and measuring agency. This output is part of the Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) programme

This paper examines how women’s fertility responds to increases in their earnings and household wealth, using 6 experiments conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa. Contrary to predictions that an increase in female earnings raises the opportunity cost of childbearing and that this will lower fertility, the findings show that an increase in the profits of female business-owners in Ethiopia and Togo results in them having more children. The findings also show a positive fertility response to increases in the value of household assets induced by land formalization programmes in Benin and Ghana. These results are driven by women who are in most need of sons for support in old age or in the event of widowhood. The findings suggest that women’s lack of long-term economic security is an important driver of fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa. This output is part of the Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) programme.

Household surveys give a precise estimate of poverty, however, surveys are costly and are fielded infrequently. We demonstrate the importance of jointly using multiple public and private sector data sources to estimate levels and changes in wealth for a large set of countries. We train models using 63,854 survey cluster locations across 59 countries, relying on data from satellites, Facebook Marketing information, and OpenStreetMaps. The model generalizes previous approaches to a wide set of countries. On average across countries the model explains 55% (min = 14%; max = 85%) of the variation in levels of wealth at the survey cluster level and 59% (min = 0%; max = 93%) of the variation at the district level and the model explains 4% (min = 0%; max = 17%) and 6% (min = 0%; max = 26%) of the variation of changes in wealth at the cluster and district levels. Models perform best in lower income countries and in countries with higher variance in wealth. Features from night time lights, OpenStreetMaps, and land cover data are most important in explaining levels of wealth, and features from night time lights are most important in explaining changes in wealth. This is an output of the ieConnect for Impact Programme.

Land is the major source of income for most African households, particularly those engaged in agriculture. In the region, property rights over land are largely governed by informal customary systems. These systems, while deeply rooted in tradition, may not always provide sufficient security of tenure and are often influenced by patriarchal norms that disadvantage women. This brief synthesises evidence from impact evaluations conducted by the Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda. It offers insights on: strategies to enhance women’s property rights over land the effects of these strengthened rights This output is part of the Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) programme.

Based on data on the transition of young people to the labour markets of French-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa, carried out by the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche en Economie et Gestion with the financial and technical support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in 2021 on 4,710 young people, this paper analyses the reservation wage inequality between girls and boys still in the education system in Cameroon and Chad. The methods used are Ordinary Least Squares on the whole population and on girls and boys separately, the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique and conditional and unconditional quantile decompositions. The estimates show that gender is significantly correlated with reservation wages for girls and boys. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition shows that around 30% of these differences are attributable to explained characteristics, against 70% attributable to unexplained characteristics. The decomposition by conditional and unconditional quantiles without taking covariates into account shows that this gap is variable at each considered decile and quartile of the reservation wages distribution. Furthermore, conditional decompositions with covariates taken into account show that gender differences in field of study and level of education are important in explaining the gender gap in young people’s wage claims. This research is part of the G2LM Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries programme

Gender equality is central to economic development. This paper examines gender gaps in Burkina Faso and find that women’s labour force participation is 10 percentage points lower than men’s in 2019, while their wage earnings are 82% lower, business revenues are 61% lower, and value of agricultural production is 61% lower. Nationally, gender gaps in labour force participation, business revenues and crop sales are unchanged when compared to 2014 but increased significantly for wage earnings and (to a lesser extent) for harvest value. The gender gap in labour force participation increased in urban areas, while the northern part of Burkina Faso witnessed large increases in the business revenue gender gap. The wage gap increased most in more rural regions. Results from decomposition analysis show that women’s lack of capital and male workers, lack of control over income and lower economic benefits from marriage along with lower levels of skills and farming inputs have the largest associations with the gaps. The paper reviews evidence based policy options for tackling the identified gaps for each sector, which include providing vocational skills to women, improving their access to capital, increasing the effectiveness of agricultural extension services and expanding the provision of childcare services and gender norms interventions. This output is part of the Africa Gender Innovation Lab programme.

In big cities in low and middle income countries, vulnerable populations often face challenges in accessing services and economic opportunities, owing to disadvantages stemming from spatial inequalities. Today 55% per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is projected to rise to about 70% by 2050. Improving the mobility of vulnerable populations in large urban centres is therefore central to reduce poverty and enhance global wellbeing in a sustainable manner. This is an output of the ieConnect for impact programme.

Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) allocation is a mechanism used by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to provide its member countries with additional reserve assets. SDRs are a type of international currency that can be used to supplement a country’s official reserves or for international transactions. Countries could immediately use a new allocation of SDRs for debt relief, to import life-saving necessities, and to support key public services. In many cases, SDRs provide important financial support without being converted to hard currency. They help reduce capital flight balance of payments deficit and fiscal crises. These additional reserves can also lower countries’ borrowing costs1 (Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2022). This research is part of the Capacity for Economic Research and Policy making in Africa (CERPA) programme.

On 2 August 2021, the International Monetary Fund announced the largest (in its history) allocation of Special Drawing Rights(SDRs) worth US$650 billion (€550 billion),which was approved with effect from 23 August 2021. A large proportion of the total allocation went to developed economies because they hold much higher quotas, although the levels of SDR utilisation by these countries have been historically very low, compared to developing countries like Ghana. The important question is: in what ways could Ghana benefit from SDRs beyond its allocation? How can the unused SDRs allocations be rechannelled to support developing countries’ public finances and help their recovery from recurrent global multiple shocks? To help address these questions, this case study on Ghana sought to: comprehensively explore the state of Ghana’s public sector finance and how it has been affected by the triple crisis (COVID-19 pandemic, rising external debts, and Russia-Ukraine war) explore the evolution of Ghana’s external balance position and its vulnerabilities in the context of local constraints and external shocks explore the opportunities for using SDR facilities to support public financial management, improve external balance position, and as a vehicle to promote stable economic growth and development in Ghana This research is part of the Capacity for Economic Research and Policy making in Africa (CERPA) programme.

Kenya, like most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, has faced and coped with multiple shocks amid reduced fiscal headroom and increasing public debt vulnerabilities. Other than the COVID-19 global health crisis and the resulting economic effects, Kenya faced the desert locust invasion in 2020, prolonged droughts in 2021 and 2022, and the accompanying high cost of living exacerbated by the spill over effects of the Russian-Ukraine war. These developments came when the economy had inadequate domestic resources to sustain the post-COVID-19 recovery momentum, and the mounting debt levels constrained the ability to raise new funding. Following a series of recurrent shocks, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) supported member countries substantially. This support took multiple forms, including the Rapid Credit Facility (RCF), the Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI) and Resilience and Sustainability Trust (RST), which provided emergency loans to low income and middle income countries facing urgent balance of payments needs. This research is part of the Capacity for Economic Research and Policy making in Africa (CERPA) programme.

The Senegalese economy has recently been hit by a combination of multiple shocks, after a period of sustained growth of 6% on average for 6 years (2014 to 2019). In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to the slowdown, or even cessation of activities in several sectors, leading to a decline of more than 3 points in real GDP growth. Economic growth fell from 5.3% in 2019 to 1.5% in 2020 (Direction de la Prévision et des Etudes Economiques - DPEE, 2020, 2021). Geopolitical tensions in Ukraine have hit hard the Senegalese economy in 2022. This combination of external shocks has amplified the effects of climatic shocks which have worsened over the last decade. This research is part of the Capacity for Economic Research and Policy making in Africa (CERPA) programme.

Economic progress brings with it 2 key patterns. Firstly, this paper observes the progressive change in the demographic structure of the population. Secondly, as nations advance economically, the portion of food in total expenditures tends to decrease. The finding suggests that an ageing population will result in a higher overall food share of total expenditures. The author test this hypothesis by constructing a quantitative, demand side model and document that the demographic evolution slows down the shift away from food consumption in almost every country in the sample. The correlation between income and the demographic transition implies that not accounting for demography leads to an underestimation of the income effect by up to 20%. This paper is part of the Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG) programme.