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Rapid fertility decline, a strong expansion of female education, and favorable economic conditions should have promoted female labor force participation in developing countries. Yet trends in female labor force participation rates (FLFP) have been quite heterogeneous, rising strongly in Latin America and stagnating in many other regions, while improvements were modest in the Middle East and female participation even fell in South Asia. These trends are inconsistent with secular theories such as the feminization U hypothesis but point to an interplay of initial conditions, economic structure, structural change, and persistent gender norms and values. We find that differences in levels are heavily affected by historical differences in economic structure that circumscribe women’s economic opportunities still today. Shocks can bring about drastic changes, with the experience of socialism being the most important shock to women’s labor force participation. Trends are heavily affected by how much women’s labor force participation depends on their household’s economic conditions, how jobs deemed appropriate for more educated women are growing relative to the supply of more educated women, whether growth strategies are promoting female employment, and to what extent women are able to break down occupational barriers within the sectors where women predominantly work.

PurposeMuch research has been conducted regarding leadership success challenges. However, few are practically oriented on whether the success of women's leadership aligns to organisational, personal and societal contexts as glass cliffs. Thus, this study aims to examine these factors and introduce how they inhibit women from leadership success.Design/methodology/approachThis research examined the glass ceiling effects Ethiopian women leaders face. This research focused on adjusted clusters and a survey of 446 female employees from zones, woreda and kebeles. The data was processed through SPSS 25.0 to regress the values.FindingsBreaking the glass ceiling, the glass cliffs effects on women’s income levels, the lack of an arena for self-improvement, the nature of organisation policies and challenges in teamwork were found to contribute to women’s under-representation in top leadership positions.Research limitations/implicationsThe results focused only on the 94 public organisations in Ethiopia that were selected by adjusted cluster sampling.Practical implicationsRealizations of substantial change and refocusing on bringing a significant number of women to the boardrooms in the public bureaucracy, besides glass cliffs.Social implicationsEnhancing the importance of accepting women leaders.Originality/valueTo add value to the stock of literature in gender equality, this research brings a strategic focus on factors that inhibit women from top leadership positions.

Participation in global value chains (GVC) has recently been highlighted as a pathway to fast-track development in productivity growth through productive and allocative efficiency, particularly in Africa and other developing countries where structural change has stalled. This paper investigates how participation in GVC affects aggregate labor productivity growth. It further quantifies how the aggregate labor productivity growth effects of GVC are distributed among the sub-components—within (intra-sector) effect and structural change (inter-sector) effect. Using data for a sample of 46 developing countries and utilizing panel fixed-effect and instrumental variable estimations, the study finds that participation in GVC has a positive and significant effect on aggregate labor productivity growth in developing countries. These benefits arise in all countries in the study sample including those in Africa but most strongly in countries in Asia and Latin America. This is regardless of whether countries are integrated into GVC through backward or forward participation, however, with a relatively stronger positive effect through forward participation. The results from the analysis of the two sub-components of aggregate labor productivity growth show that GVC participation has a positive and significant effect on the within component by inducing an efficient reallocation of resources within but not across sectors.

Is it in the interest of a developing country to promote strong local linkages for domestic industries or to participate in global value chains (GVCs) wherein linkages are globally dispersed? This paper informs this debate by empirically analyzing which one of these strategies would result in higher levels of domestic value added (DVA) and employment in India. Using a unique panel data on DVA and jobs tied to Indian exports from 112 sectors for the period 1999–2000 to 2012–2013, we show that greater backward GVC participation—use of imported inputs to produce for exports—leads to higher absolute levels of gross exports, DVA and employment. This result implies that labor abundant countries can reap dividends by adopting policies aimed at strengthening their backward participation in GVCs. Our findings are robust to various estimation techniques and instrumental variable approaches to address potential endogeneity concerns.

The People’s Republic of China is aging rapidly at one of the most rapid paces in the world. The resulting decline in the share of the population that is of working age creates challenges for both the economy and society, making it relevant to explore the health capacity to work among older persons. Using census data and data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper applies two widely used methods to estimate the additional health capacity to work. The results confirm large untapped work capacity in the population of older persons, but the additional health capacity to work is unevenly distributed among different groups: Women and urban residents have more additional work capacity than men and older persons in rural areas. Pension systems and variation in types of work contribute to the urban–rural difference.

Uninsured risk constrains households in their production decisions in many developing countries. Similarly to crop insurance, employment guarantees can support farmers in managing agricultural production risks. Evidence from representative panel data of Andhra Pradesh, India, suggests that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) reduces households’ uncertainty about future income streams because it provides employment opportunities in rural areas independently of weather shocks and crop failure. Therewith the NREGS makes an ex-post labor supply response to agricultural shocks more efficient. Households with access to the NREGS are found to shift their production toward riskier but also more profitable crops. The observed shifts in agricultural production do considerably raise the profitability of agricultural production and hence the incomes of smallholder farmers. The findings are not driven by changes in the labor or cost intensity of those crops, which supports the idea that the causal mechanism underlying the observed changes is indeed an insurance effect.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) can potentially contribute to the structural transformation that will create jobs for Africa’s young and underemployed workforce. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the direct and indirect employment effects of greenfield investment, the most common form of FDI on the continent. We address this knowledge gap by constructing a comprehensive, Africa-wide project-level dataset on greenfield FDI for the period 2013 to 2020, combining information from the two leading commercial databases of project-level greenfield FDI, fDi Markets and Orbis Cross Border Investment. Based on this novel publicly available dataset, we show that there is little overlap in the projects covered by the two databases, implying that the total number of greenfield FDI projects in Africa is much larger than suggested, for example, by UNCTAD’s flagship World Investment Report. Descriptive analyses based on our database and ILO employment data suggest that direct job creation in greenfield projects may be an important driver of formal employment creation in services and manufacturing in selected countries. However, direct greenfield job creation is small relative to total job creation, and indicative correlation regressions even hint at potential crowding-out of formal employment in domestic firms. JEL Codes F23; J4, L16; N17.

Do multinational enterprises create local job opportunities in developing countries? We address this question in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa by combining information on domestic and foreign multinationals’ affiliates over more than a decade with geolocalised individual-level data on labor supply. Having a multinational’s affiliate within walking distance correlates with an increase in employment of about +4% with respect to the sample mean. Multinationals’ activity is correlated with higher off–farm and lower on–farm employment (+13% and −7%, respectively), a result driven by affiliates of foreign companies. Female employment and \"good jobs\" increase around affiliates, but only when they are part of foreign groups. A battery of robustness checks and a retrospective analysis exploiting time variation in the individual labor market entry deliver qualitatively similar results, suggesting our findings do not suffer major identification issues.

While social mobility in advanced economies has received extensive scholarly attention, crucial knowledge gaps remain about the patterns and determinants of income, educational, and occupational mobility in developing countries. Focusing on intergenerational mobility, we find that estimates often differ greatly for the same country, depending on the concept and measure of mobility used, on variable constructions and on the data set utilized. There is also wide variation in mobility across regions and social groups. We discuss data and income and other variable measurement challenges when agriculture and the informal sector absorb most of the workforce, and illustrate why occupational classifications and widely used mobility measures may perform less well in such settings. Factors beyond those featuring in the literature on advanced economies are plausible determinants of social mobility, particularly of what we call moderate and large ascents (and descents), in developing country contexts. We highlight the lack of in-depth understanding of the multiple and often localized hurdles to such more pronounced progress. Similar knowledge gaps exist for large descents, which give rise to particularly profound concerns in low-income settings. We report and touch on the implications of suggestive findings of a disconnect between educational and occupational mobility. Innovative research requires critical engagement with theory and with methodology, identification, and data challenges that may overlap or deviate notably from those encountered in advanced economies.

This paper examines the relationship between structural change, as measured by sectoral composition of employment and value-added (VA), and aggregate productivity growth for sub-Sahara African (SSA) Least Developed Countries (LDCs), using panel data from 1991 to 2018. First, a Granger causality test finds that the relationship between structural change and economic growth is bidirectional. Next, the Pooled Mean Group, a dynamic panel data estimator teases out short-run and long-run effects of structural change on economic growth. The results suggest that the magnitude of labor and VA reallocation across sectors is not large enough to have a significant impact on economic growth, implying that the direction of structural change is important when analyzing its impact on growth in the SSA LDCs. The paper also explains why labor in the SSA LDCs moves from one low productivity sector to another and how that pans out for development.