Do public sector workers earn a wage premium in Djibouti and are the returns to education different across the sectors? The authors estimate private and public sector wage earnings using 1996 household survey data, while controlling for selectivity using Heckman's two stage approach. They find that Djiboutian public sector employees earn a wage premium, independent of their personal attributes and human capital endowments, and are more likely to be males and have parents in the public sector. Workers in the public sector earn higher private rates of return to education than do private sector workers with post-secondary schooling. These results raise concerns about current government hiring and wage-setting practices that generate distortions in the labor market and are not efficiently allocating labor and public resources.

"The second BREDA report on EFA in Africa completes the previous one published in 2005. It incorporates the most recent available data, for 2004/05 or 2005/06 and as such, benefits from the necessary hindsight for drawing up a precise statement of the consequences of the Dakar Forum [2000]."--Page 17.

"The authors analyze the impact of privatization on the performance of 116 electric utilities in 10 Latin American countries. The analysis makes a number of contributions to the literature on changes in infrastructure ownership. First, this is the first systemic analysis of the impact of privatization on the distribution of the electricity sector. Second, it constructs an unbalanced panel data set of key indicators for each country. Third, it includes a broader-than in past studies-range of indicators, such as output, employment, productivity, efficiency, quality, coverage, and prices, offering a fuller picture of the effects of privatization on consumers. Fourth, this research covers a longer period of time, and evaluates three stages-before, transition, and after-allowing for the identification of the short- and long-run effects of privatization, as opposed to previous analyses' short time series data that do not identify long-run outcomes. Finally, the counterfactual is considered through the analysis in trends. The authors apply two different methodologies. The first methodology uses means and medians from each period and tests the significance of the changes between periods. The second methodology consists of an econometric model that captures firm fixed effects, firm-specific time trends, and heteroscedasticity corrections. When needed, the authors used firm-specific time trends to better understand the outcomes. The results suggest that changes in ownership generate significant improvements in labor productivity, efficiency, and product and service quality, and that most of those changes occur in the transition period. Improvements in the post transition period-beyond two years after the change in ownership-are much more modest. "--World Bank web site.

This pocket-sized reference on key environmental data for over 200 countries includes key indicators on agriculture, forestry, biodiversity, energy, emission and pollution, and water and sanitation. The volume helps establish a sound base of information to help set priorities and measure progress toward environmental sustainability goals.

The 2018/19 edition analyses the gender pay gap. The report focuses on two main challenges: how to find the most useful means for measurement, and how to break down the gender pay gap in ways that best inform policy-makers and social partners of the factors that underlie it. The report also includes a review of key policy issues regarding wages and the reduction of gender pay gaps in different national circumstances.

"This paper uses a new dataset, "WATSAN," of private sector participation (PSP) projects for water and sanitation in developing countries to examine the determinants of the number of projects signed for each country between 1990 and 2004. The new dataset improves on existing sources, in particular in its coverage of projects with local investors, and provides adequate data for cross-country regression analysis. The authors use a negative binomial regression model to investigate the factors influencing the number of PSP projects in a sample of 60 developing countries with 460 PSP projects. The regression results provide support for the hypotheses that PSP is greater in larger markets where the ability to pay is higher and where governments are fiscally constrained. The authors test several indicators of institutional quality and find that these are generally significant in determining the number of projects signed for each country. Measures of the protection of property rights and the quality of the bureaucracy emerge as the most important institutions that encourage PSP. Rule of law and the control of corruption are significant, albeit at a lower level, while the quality of contract law and political stability are not robustly significant. "--World Bank web site.