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The first part of the report presents stylized facts of youth and labor markets in Africa. The second part discusses past youth employment interventions in the region. It argues for the need of an integrated approach should governments want to tackle youth employment issues in a sustainable manner. Indeed, in African countries, with large informal sectors and dominance of rural population, solely reforming labor market institutions and implementing active labor market policies are likely to have limited impact. It argues that the most needed and well-rounded approaches are: expanding job and education alternatives in the rural areas, where most youth live; promoting and encouraging mobility; creating a conducive business environment; encouraging the private sector; improving the access and quality of skills formation; taking care of demographic issues that more directly affects the youth; and reducing child labor.

Gender and racial discrimination at work have gradually gained more attention from the public in the recent years. With social movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, people start to reach the consensus that there should be more equality in society; more perspectives from different genders and different races are beneficial to society. This paper focuses on employment in the general workforce and studies how race and gender diversity in different job positions affect the economy. This paper explores to empirically explain why race and gender diversity in the workforce can have an impact on the economy. Using data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and from the Federal Reserve for the years of 1996 - 2018, this paper finds that race and gender diversity at work are positively associated with the economy. Also, this dataset sup- ports the conjecture that race and gender diversity increases total employment, which further increases the economy. This dataset also supports the possibility that race and gender diversity may increase the capacity of different perspectives, which further increases the economy. Moreover, race and gender diversity both increased during these years: from 11.783% to 23.339% and from 31.683% to 38.735% in the executive and managerial positions. This study has significant contributions to current research and practice.

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.

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing decline in the aggregate skill premium of 30 percent between 1970 and 1990, with only a modest recovery in the next couple of decades. In contrast, the US skill premium rose by around 24 percent over those four decades. A theory that equalizes wages with marginal products can rationalize these disparate outcomes when we replace commonly used measures of total labor supplies by private sector employment. The dramatic decline in the skill premium in Sweden is the result of an expanding public sector that has disproportionately hired unskilled labor.

Under the framework of growth accounting, this paper introduces four heterogeneity characteristics of labor, namely, educational level, age, gender and industry, constructs a cross classification matrix of employment, labor compensation and working hours, and calculates the labor input (volume) of the whole country and of 19 industries during 2000–2018. Then it decomposes the volume into quantity and quality parts to analyze the total amount of labor input and the performance of industry labor input. The results are as follows. First, during the research period, the annual growth rate of labor input was 2.5%, and 78.8% of that came from the growth of labor input quality. The growth of labor input was mainly resulted from the improvement of educational level and the optimization of industrial structure. Second, in 2018, the proportions of labor input of the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors were 13.76%, 31.06% and 55.18% respectively, and the transfer speed of labor input to the secondary and tertiary sectors was higher than that of the quantity structure; the labor input volume in the new economy and related industries in the tertiary sector has been greatly increased. Third, the index method-based labor productivity (ILP) of some producer service and consumer service industries was relatively low, and the growth of total industry output mainly attributed to the increase of labor input and the expansion of industrial scale. The improvement of labor input quality has become the key to the growth of labor input in China, and the improvement of educational level is the core power to improve the labor input quality.

This study assesses the potential for job creation through infrastructure investment in the Middle East and North Africa. The region has experience in making the most of infrastructure investments, but maintaining and spreading the momentum in infrastructure will be important to support future growth and job creation. To do so, policymakers will have to recognize that there are large differences in initial conditions across the region in terms of starting stock, needs, fiscal commitments, private sector participation and job creation potential. Overall, the region’s infrastructure needs through 2020 are quite large and estimated at about 106 billion dollars per year or 6.9 percent of the annual regional GDP. The differences in infrastructure and maintenance needs across sub-regions are also impressive, with developing oil exporters expected to require almost 11 percent of their GDP annually, while the oil importing countries and the GCC oil exporters expected to need approximately 6 and 5 percent of their GDP, respectively. Investment and rehabilitation needs are likely to be especially high in the electricity and transport sectors, particularly roads. Rehabilitation needs are expected to account for slightly more than half of total infrastructure needs. While oil exporters will be able to meet their national infrastructure needs if they maintain investment spending at rates prevailing in the 2000s, oil importers will fall short. The infrastructure sector has the potential to contribute to employment creation in MENA. The region could generate 2.0 million direct jobs and 2.5 million direct, indirect and induced infrastructure-related jobs just by meeting estimated, annual investment needs. However, the potential varies greatly across countries, and infrastructure alone will not resolve MENA’s unemployment problem. Going forward, decisions on what types of public spending to expand and what to downsize in order to achieve balanced budgets will have important implications for jobs. In designing country specific solutions, governments will have to tackle predictable challenges: the governance of job creation, the proper targeting and fiscal costs assessment of subsidies needed to create jobs, the design and fiscal costs of the (re)training programs needed and the expectations on the job creation effects of infrastructure.

The aim of this paper is to provide new estimates of employment-output elasticities and assess the effect of structural and macroeocnomic policies on the employment-intensity of growth. Using an unbalanced panel of 167 countries over the period 1991 - 2009, the results suggest that structural policies aimed at increasing labor and product market flexibility and reducing government size have a significant and positive impact on employment elasticities. In addition, the results also suggest that in order to maximize the positive impact on the responsiveness of employment to economic activity, structural policies have to be complemented with macroeconomic policies aimed at increasing macroeconomic stability.

This paper gauges the potential effects on employment of rebalancing China's exportoriented growth model toward domestic demand, particularly private consumption. Shifting to a private consumption-led growth likely means more demand for existing and new services as well as reorienting the production of tradable goods toward domestic markets. In China's case, this would also imply moving a large number of less skilled labor from the tradable sector to the nontradable sector. The paper shows that while rebalancing China's growth toward a domestic-demand-led economy would likely raise aggregate employment and employment opportunities in the longer term, there could be employment losses in the short run as the economy moves away from the tradable sector toward the nontradable sector. Mitigating these costs will require active labor market policies to cushion the employment impact in the transition, particularly in meeting the skills gap of associated with this transition.

Youth employment issues are a major concern for many countries because they have negative effects on the welfare of young people, and may also adversely affect economic performance and social stability. This is the first Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) evaluation of the World Bank Group's support to countries trying to address youth employment issues. The World Bank lending portfolio for youth employment is relatively small, although components of programs appear in 57 countries. Most projects include interventions in skills development and school-to-work transition. Half of the projects include interventions to foster job creation and work opportunities for youth. International Finance Corporation (IFC) has a broad approach to job creation. Between FY01 and FY11 youth employment has not been specifically targeted, except in the Middle East and North Africa region and in a small number of other interventions. IFC invested

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.