Papers presented at the Conference on Regulation, Deregulation and Reregulation, held at Singapore during 22-24 March 2004.

Labor market deregulation, intended to boost productivity and employment, is one plausible, yet little studied, driver of the decline in labor shares that took place across most advanced economies since the early 1990s. This paper assesses the impact of job protection deregulation in a sample of 26 advanced economies over the period 1970-2015, using a newly constructed dataset of major reforms to employment protection legislation for regular contracts. We apply the local projection method to estimate the dynamic response of the labor share to our reform events at both the country and the country-industry levels. For the latter, we employ a differences-in-differences identification strategy using two identifying assumptions grounded in theory—namely that job protection deregulation should have larger negative effects in industries characterized by (i) a higher “natural” propensity to adjust the workforce, and (ii) a lower elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. We find a statistically significant, economically large and robust negative effect of deregulation on the labor share. In particular, illustrative back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that job protection deregulation may have contributed about 15 percent to the average labor share decline in advanced economies. Together with existing evidence regarding the macroeconomic gains from job protection and other labor market reforms, our results also point to the need for policymakers to address efficiency-equity trade-offs when designing such reforms.

Seventeen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2020 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity.

Belman and Wolfson perform a meta-analysis on scores of published studies on the effects of the minimum wage to determine its impacts on employment, wages, poverty, and more.

This edited collection examines the labour laws of seven industrializing East Asian societies - China, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam - and discusses the variation in their impact across the whole region. Leading scholars from each country consider both laws pertaining to working conditions and industrial relations, and those that regulate the labour market as a whole. Legislation concerning migrant labour, gender equality, employment creation and skills formation is also examined. Adopting their own distinct theoretical perspectives, the authors trace the historical development of labour regulation and reveal that most countries in the region now have quite extensive frameworks. This book will be particularly useful to people interested in the place of labour law, and law in general, in contemporary East Asian societies.

The book focuses on Indonesia's most pressing labor market challenges and associated policy options to achieve higher and more inclusive economic growth. The challenges consist of creating jobs for and the skills in a youthful and increasingly better educated workforce, and raising the productivity of less-educated workers to meet the demands of the digital age. The book deals with a range of interrelated topics---the changing supply and demand for labor in relation to the shift of workers out of agriculture; urbanization and the growth of megacities; raising the quality of schooling for new jobs in the digital economy; and labor market policies to improve both labor standards and productivity.