Poor people derive most of their income from work; however, there is insufficient understanding of the role of employment and earnings as a linkage between growth and poverty reduction, especially in low income countries. To provide inputs into the policy discussion on how to enhance poverty reduction through increased employment and earnings for given growth levels, this study explores this linkage in the case of Bangladesh. The study provides a background discussion of poverty, reform, and growth in Bangladesh, followed by an overview of the labor market: demographies, the institutional stru.

This second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the World Bank shows the substantial progress the Bank has made, this mainly through the dictionary section with concise entries on its component institutions, related organizations, its achievements in various fields, some of the major projects and member countries, and its various presidents. The introduction explains how the Bank works while the chronology traces the major events over nearly 70 years. Meanwhile, the list of acronyms reminds us just who the main players are. And the bibliography directs readers to useful internal documentation and outside studies.

This book brings together the contributions of 2014 IZA Prize in Labor Economics award winner Gary Fields to address global employment and poverty problems. The central questions in his work are how economic growth affects standards of living, how labor markets work in developing countries, and how different labor market policies affect well-being.

This book portrays the scene where corporate international trade agreements, a new neoliberal state regime, and a growing textile market have contributed to the becoming of a new class of Muslim female workers—who labor in Bangladesh’s apparel export factories under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. The garment kormi—often abstracted by the homogenizing category of the “garment worker”—remain lost in the statistics of development and empowerment or contrarily exploitation. Thereby, focusing on the everyday lives of garment kormi, i.e., workers’ stories than on the collective of garment workers as a category, this book at one front highlights the neoliberal structures of difference and inequality, and on the other reflects on the potential of egalitarianism and change in terms of novel ways of comprising and expressing life-worlds. It shows that the values in life and the structures that govern life, such as contemporary Bangladesh’s neoliberal order, kinship relationality, and religiosity, are co-constitutive, multi-layered, and always on the move, never fixed.

Ghana was, until very recently, a success story in Africa, achieving high and sustained growth and impressive poverty reduction. However, Ghana is now facing major challenges in diversifying its economy, sustaining growth, and making it more inclusive. Most of the new jobs that have been created in the past decade have been in low-earning, low-productivity trade services. Macroeconomic instability, limited diversification and growing inequities in Ghana’s labor markets make it harder for the economy to create more jobs, and particularly, better jobs. Employment needs to expand in both urban areas, which will continue to grow rapidly, and rural areas, where poverty is still concentrated. The current fiscal and economic crisis is heightening the need for urgent reforms but limiting the room for maneuver and increasing pressure for a careful prioritization of policy actions. Going forward, Ghana will need to consider an integrated jobs strategy that addresses barriers to the business climate, deficiencies in skills, lack of competitiveness of job-creating sectors, problems with labor mobility, and the need for comprehensive labor market regulation. Ghana needs to diversify its economy through gains in productivity in sectors like agribusiness, transport, construction, energy, and information and communications technology (ICT) services. Productivity needs to be increased also in agriculture, in order to increase the earnings potential for the many poor who still work there. In particular, Ghana’s youth and women need help in connecting to these jobs, through relevant skills development and services that target gaps in information about job opportunities. Even with significant effort, most of Ghana’s population will continue to work in jobs characterized by low and fluctuating earnings for the foreseeable future, however, and they will need social safety nets that help them manage vulnerability to income shortfalls. More productive and inclusive jobs will help Ghana move to a second phase of structural transformation and develop into a modern middle-income economy.

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Using data from multiple sources, we show that in Bangladesh, the increase in real wages, particularly female wages, has accelerated since the late 2000s, suggesting that the Lewis turning point (the point at which the labor market starts to shift in favor of workers) has arrived in Bangladesh. Rising wages are likely a result of a combination of more ample job opportunities in the nonfarm sector, especially in the manufacturing sector for females, and a greater amount of remittances, primarily from male workers overseas. Since human capital is the most important asset for the poor, the escalation in real wages has boosted the poor’s earnings, thereby reducing their likelihood of being poor.