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Since the early 1990s, countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region have made admirable progress in reducing the gap between girls and boys in areas such as access to education and health care. Indeed, almost all young girls in the Region attend school, and more women than men are enrolled in university. Over the past two decades, maternal mortality declined 60 percent, the largest decrease in the world. Women in MENA are more educated than ever before. It is not only in the protest squares that have seen women whose aspirations are changing rapidly but increasingly unmet. The worldwide average for the participation of women in the workforce is approximately 50 percent. In MENA, their participation is half that at 25 percent. Facing popular pressure to be more open and inclusive, some governments in the region are considering and implementing electoral and constitutional reforms to deepen democracy. These reforms present an opportunity to enhance economic, social, and political inclusion for all, including women, who make up half the population. However, the outlook remains uncertain. Finally, there are limited private sector and entrepreneurial prospects not only for jobs but also for those women who aspire to create and run a business. These constraints present multiple challenges for reform. Each country in MENA will, of course, confront these constraints in different contexts. However, inherent in many of these challenges are rich opportunities as reforms unleash new economic actors. For the private sector, the challenge is to create more jobs for young women and men. The World Bank has been pursuing an exciting pilot program in Jordan to assist young women graduates in preparing to face the work environment.

\"One of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we investigate the process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated, and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women. When few women participate in the labor force, data are scarce and participation rises slowly. As information accumulates in some regions, the effects of maternal employment become less uncertain and more women in that region participate. Learning accelerates, labor force participation rises faster, and regional participation rates diverge. Eventually, information diffuses throughout the economy, beliefs converge to the truth, participation flattens out, and regions become more similar again. To investigate the empirical relevance of our theory, we use a new county-level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time series and geographic patterns of participation.\" (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt; historisch. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1940 bis 2005.

The results of the review do not disappoint. The authors identified more than 120 cash transfer programs that were implemented between 2000 and mid-2009 in Sub-Saharan Africa. These programs have varying objectives, targeting, scale, conditions, technologies, and more. A sizable number of these programs conducted robust impact evaluations that provide important information, presented here, on the merits of cash transfer programs and their specific design features in the African context. The authors present summary information on programs, often in useful graphs, and provide detailed reference material in the appendixes. They highlight how many of the cash transfer programs in Africa that had not yet begun implementation at the time of writing will continue to provide important evaluation results that will guide the design of cash transfer programs in the region. In addition to presenting data and analysis on the mechanics of the programs, the authors discuss issues related to political economy. They highlight the importance of addressing key tradeoffs in cash transfers, political will, and buy-in, and they emphasize the need to build evidence-based debates on cash transfer programs. Useful anecdotes and discussion illustrate how some programs have dealt with these issues with varying degrees of success. This text will serve as a useful reference for years to come for those interested in large- and small-scale issues of cash transfer implementation, both in Africa and beyond. However, the book is not an end in itself. It also raises important questions that must be addressed and knowledge gaps that must be filled. Therefore, it is useful both in the information it provides and in the issues and questions it raises.

An oft-cited strategy to advance economic development is to further integrate developing countries into global trade, particularly through global value chains, bolstered by the expansion of female-intensive industries to bring more women into the formal labor force.

This study surveys active labor market programs (ALMPs) in selected countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, identifies key challenges to their effective and efficient delivery, and proposes a policy framework for reforming public service provision. This study draws on data collected through surveys administered to public social, employment, and education agencies in selected MENA countries to identify key constraints and options for reforming publicly provided employment programs. Recent political transitions arising from the Arab Spring have contributed to the deterioration of labor market outcomes in the MENA region. In this context, ALMPs could become an important policy lever to address some of the challenges facing labor markets. These include: joblessness, skills mismatches, lack of labor market mobility, large and expanding informal sector, and lack of formal employment networks. The study also provides specific details on the beneficiaries, targeting, and expenditures of ALMPs during this same period.

Two key issues in the literature on female labor supply are (i) whether persistence in employment status is due to unobserved heterogeneity or state dependence, and (ii) whether fertility is exogenous to labor supply. Until recently, the consensus was that unobserved heterogeneity is very important and fertility is endogenous. Hyslop (1999) challenged this. Using a dynamic panel probit model of female labor supply including heterogeneity and state dependence, he found that adding autoregressive errors led to a substantial diminution in the importance of heterogeneity. This, in turn, meant he could not reject that fertility is exogenous. Here, we extend Hyslop (1999) to allow classification error in employment status, using an estimation procedure developed by Keane and Wolpin (2001) and Keane and Sauer (2005). We find that a fairly small amount of classification error is enough to overturn Hyslop's conclusions, leading to overwhelming rejection of the hypothesis of exogenous fertility.

Tunisians are striving for the opportunity to realize their potential and aspirations in a country that is rich in both human and physical capital, but whose recent economic growth has failed to create enough opportunities in the form of good and productive jobs. This report highlights the main barriers that hinder the Tunisian labor market from providing income, protection, and prosperity to its citizens and proposes a set of labor policies that could facilitate the creation of better, more inclusive, and more productive jobs. The weak economic performance and insufficient and low-quality job creation in Tunisia is primarily the result of an economic environment permeated by distortions, barriers to competition, and excessive red tape, including in the labor market. This has resulted in the creation of a insufficient number of jobs, especially in the formal sector. To change this situation, policy makers need to address five strategic directives that can promote long-term inclusive growth and formality: foster competition; realign incentives, pay, and benefit packages in the public sector; move toward labor regulations that promote labor mobility and provide support to workers in periods of transition; enhance the productivity of informal workers through training and skills building; and reform existing social insurance systems and introduce new instruments to attain broader coverage.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the causality between female labor supply and fertility in the presence of auxiliary variables such as education, female wages, and male relative cohort size. We employ annual time series data spanning the period 1948 to 2007 for both an aggregate and an age-specific group. Our econometric specification follows closely the concepts and procedures proposed by Dufour and Renault (Econometrica 66(5):1099—1125, 1998) and Dufour et al. (J Econom 132:337—362, 2006) in that we conduct multi-horizon causality tests that allow for direct and indirect effects to take place. The sign and economic importance of our results is assessed via the estimation of impulse response functions. Our results establish bidirectional indirect causality between female labor supply and fertility and suggest interesting causal chains among the system variables. Causality effects are stronger for the age-specific group.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the link between two different family policy dimensions – one supporting the combination of work and parenthood and one supporting stay-at-home mothers – and fertility rates between 1995 and 2011 in 33 industrialized countries.Design/methodology/approachTotal fertility rates were regressed on the two policy dimensions, earner–carer support and traditional–family support, using pooled time-series analysis with country fixed effects and stepwise control for female labor force participation, unemployment rates and GDP.FindingsThe analyses show that earner–carer support is linked to higher fertility, while traditional–family support is not. Also, higher female labor force participation is linked to higher fertility before GDP is included. Conversely, higher unemployment is correlated with lower fertility levels. Sensitivity analyses with and without day care enrollment on a smaller set of countries show no influence of day care on the results for family policy.Originality/valueThe results give weight to the argument that family policies supporting the combination of work and parenthood could increase fertility in low-fertility countries, probably mediated in part by female labor force participation. Earnings-related earner–carer support incentivizes women to enter the labor force before parenthood and to return to work after time off with their newborn child, thus supporting a combination of work and parenthood.