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This paper studies the impact of gender and ethnicity on educational outcomes using cross-country evidence from Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. It uses the Minnesota Population Center's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International database, which includes individual-level data from large, harmonised, and representative samples of country censuses. Using an estimation method analogous to difference-in-differences, the paper finds that gender-based differences in literacy, primary school completion, and secondary school completion are larger for minority ethnic groups compared with others or, alternatively, ethnicity-based differences are larger for women compared with men. The findings suggest that the intersection of gender and ethnicity confers cumulative disadvantage for minority groups, especially in Latin America. The paper discusses the implications of these findings on the design of, targeting in, and resource allocation for development programs.

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There has long been a concern among policymakers that too much of remittances are consumed and too little saved, limiting the development impact of migration. Financial literacy programs have become an increasingly popular way to try and address this issue, but to date there is no evidence that they are effective in inducing savings among remittance-receiving households, nor is it clear whether such programs are best targeted at the migrant, the remittance receiver, or both. The authors conducted a randomized experiment in Indonesia which allocated migrants and their families to a control group, a migrant-only training group, a family member-only training group, and a training group in which both the migrant and a family member were trained. Three rounds of follow-up surveys are then used to measure impacts on the financial knowledge, behaviors, and remittance and savings outcomes of the remaining household. They find that training both the migrant and the family member together has large and significant impacts on knowledge, behaviors, and savings. Training the family member alone has some positive, but smaller effects, whilst training only the migrant leads to no impacts on the remaining family members. The results show that financial education can have large effects when provided at a teachable moment, but that this impact varies greatly with who receives training.

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One of the recurrent explanations of the Arab spring is that governments were disconnected from their populations and that public policies were simply not in line with people's sentiments and expectations. This paper provides a methodology to better understand how objective conditions of deprivation are translated into subjective feelings of deprivation using a strand of the recent literature on relative deprivation. The authors apply this methodology to better understand the question of gender and youth deprivation in the context of the Moroccan labor market. They find that the reference group (the people with whom people compare themselves) plays a pivotal role in understanding how feelings of labor deprivation are generated. This can explain the apparent mismatch between objective conditions and subjective feelings of deprivation related to joblessness among young men and women. The methodology can help us understand why greater discontent may be exhibited by a group of individuals who are in fact less deprived in a material sense. It can also potentially help governments design public policies that address objective conditions of deprivation, such as unemployment, with a better understanding of subjective implications.

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The objective of this paper is to study the evolution of the incidence and profile of nonstandard workers in selected countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe and Central Asia in the past two decades. The analysis of the profile of this group of workers focuses on three key characteristics that could approximate their productivity: education level, labor income, and task content (manual/cognitive or routine/nonroutine) performed by the workers in their occupations. While in Latin America most of the countries show a stable prevalence in recent decades, in Europe and Central Asia there is not any common pattern across countries. In contrast, from the point of view of the profile of nonstable employment, there are several common characteristics among these types of workers across countries, such as improved level of education, performance of more intensive nonroutine cognitive tasks, and higher variance of labor income. The findings suggest that nonstandard workers are a heterogeneous group. The increase in the incidence of nonstandard employment and its heterogeneity generates concern about the lower level of insurance against certain risks that workers face. Therefore, a greater understanding of the trends in the prevalence and characteristics of nonstandard workers is needed to design regulation and policies oriented to these types of workers.

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This paper studies the role of social-emotional or psychological capital in determining the education and employment aspirations of adolescent girls and young women in India. The study finds that girls' self-efficacy and mental health are important determinants of their educational and employment aspirations, suggesting that these hidden forms of human capital may serve as critical targets for interventions aiming to alter girls' educational and economic trajectories. The study also identifies factors that correlate with girls' level of self-efficacy, and finds that an 'enabling' and supportive family and community environment appears to be important.

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Disasters in Bangladesh and protests elsewhere have created an intense debate about the value, particularly to women, of apparel employment in developing countries. This paper focuses on how the forces of globalization, specifically the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), have affected women's wages in the apparel sector in developing countries. The paper uses household and labor force surveys from Cambodia and Sri Lanka to estimate both apparel wage premiums relative to other industries and the male-female wage gap before and after the end of the MFA. The approach builds on new models that apply traditional trade theory (e.g., the Heckscher-Ohlin and Stolper-Samuelson theorems) to analyze the effect of globalization on gender-based earnings.

The authors find large positive wage premiums and a closing of the male-female wage gap during the MFA period, but smaller premiums and a widening wage gap after the end of the MFA. The results suggest that the benefits of apparel exports for women in developing countries remain significant post-MFA. They also model an approach for studying the effects of globalization that differentiates males and females as separate factors. This may be a fruitful alternative to discrimination models or those that analyze the effects of globalization on women in terms of skill. Further research is necessary to identify the potential development effects of post-MFA apparel employment and to thoroughly compare the benefits documented in this paper with the costs that may come with apparel jobs.

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This paper describes stylised facts about internal migration and the labor force in Egypt, and shows how internal migration in the country is low compared with international standards. Using aggregate labor force survey data, the paper shows how individuals migrate to governorates with higher wages. With a Mincerian equation, the analysis finds that migrants earn premiums with respect to non-migrants, except for those migrants with low education levels. The aggregate labor statistics reveal lower unemployment rates among migrants, a phenomenon that is verified by an employment equation. According to the econometric results, migrants are more likely to be employed, even after controlling for other observable individual characteristics. Finally, the paper estimates a Probit model for the decision to migrate, finding that more educated individuals are more likely to migrate, agricultural workers have a lower probability of migrating, and individuals from governorates in which food production for own consumption is higher are less likely to migrate. These results suggest that low educational attainment and the 'food problem', which ties resources to food production to meet subsistence requirements, are at the root of low migration in Egypt.

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Recent research shows that microenterprises in developing countries are constrained by their managerial capacity, especially in the areas of marketing, record keeping, financial planning, and stock control. In a stratified randomized controlled trial, experienced businesswomen in Ethiopia were given a formal business training that addressed these constraints. A second-stage mentoring component in which a random selection of female mentees within the social and business network of the trainees from the first-stage business training received customized mentoring from these 'trained mentors'. Pooled results using three rounds of post-training surveys carried out over three years show that business training causes profit and sales to improve by 0.21 standard deviation, while business practices improve by 0.13 standard deviation. The overall impact of mentoring is muted - strong impacts are observed on the adoption of business practices among mentees, but there is no statistically significant impact on profits.

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While existing evidence in advanced economies suggests a possible role for technological innovation in job creation, its role in developing countries remains largely undocumented. This paper sheds light on the direct impact of technological as well as organizational innovation on firm level employment growth based on the theoretical model of Harrison, Jaumandreu, Mairesse, and Peters (2014) using a sample of over 15,000 firms in Africa, South Asia, Middle East and North-Africa and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The results suggest that new sales associated with product innovations tend to be produced with just as much or higher levels of labor intensity. The effect is largest in lower income countries and the African region, where firms are further away from the technological frontier. More importantly, process innovations that involve automation of production do not have a short-term negative impact on firm employment. However, there is some evidence of a negative effect of automation on employment that manifests in increases in efficiency that reduce the elasticity of new sales to employment. Overall, these results are qualitatively similar to previous findings in advanced economies and highlight a positive direct role of innovation on the quantity of employment but at a decreasing rate as firms' transition to the technological frontier.

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There is a growing body of literature exploring the skill content of jobs. This paper contributes to this research by using data on the task content of occupations in developing countries, instead of U.S. data, as most existing studies do. The paper finds that indexes based on U.S. data do not provide a fair approximation of the levels, changes, and drivers of the routine cognitive and nonroutine manual skill content of jobs in developing countries. The paper also uncovers three new stylized facts. First, while developed countries tend to have jobs more intensive in nonroutine cognitive skills than developing countries, income (in growth and levels) is not associated with the skill content of jobs once the analysis accounts for other factors. Second, although adoption of information and communications technology is linked to job de-routinization, international trade is an offsetting force. Last, adoption of information and communications technology is correlated with lower employment growth in countries with a high share of occupations that are intensive in routine tasks.

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