Looks into the costs and benefits of labour-market reallocation of US manufacturing industries. Includes a review of the literature on implications of gross flows for the costs of labour adjustment to international factors. Concludes that gross job flows may influence gross worker flows, and therefore, human capital investment, wages and worker welfare.

This volume considers the American manufacturing industry, and develops a statistical portait of the microeconomic adjustments that affect business and workers. The authors focus on the employer rather than worker side of the process aiming to show the processes that will be relevant to economists.

A region known for its volatility, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has suffered severe economic and social setbacks from crises—including the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises have taken their toll on careers, wage growth, and productivity. Employment in Crisis: The Path to Better Jobs in a Post-COVID-19 Latin America provides new evidence on the effects of crises on the region’s workers and firms and suggests several policy responses that can bolster long-term and inclusive economic growth. This report has three key findings. First, crises lead to persistent employment losses and accelerate structural changes away from the formal sector. This change occurs more through reductions in the creation of formal jobs than through job destruction. Second, some workers recover from crises, while others are permanently scarred by them. Low-skilled workers can suffer up to a decade of lower earnings caused by crises, while high-skilled workers rebound fast, exacerbating the LAC region’s high level of inequality. Formal workers suffer smaller employment and wage losses in localities with higher rates of informality. And the reduced job flows caused by crises decrease welfare, but workers in localities with more job opportunities, whether formal or informal, bounce back better. Third, crises’ cleansing effects can increase efficiency and productivity, but these effects are dampened by the LAC region’s less competitive market structure. Rather than becoming more agile and productive during economic downturns, protected sectors and firms gain market share and crowd out others, trapping valuable resources. This report proposes a three-pronged mix of policies to improve the LAC region’s responses to crises: •Create a more stable macroeconomic environment to smooth the impacts of crises, including automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and short-term compensation programs; •Increase the capacity of social protection and labor programs to respond to crises and coalesce these programs into systems that complement income support with reemployment assistance and reskilling opportunities; and •Tackle structural issues, including the lack of product market competition and the spatial dimension behind poor labor market adjustment—a “good jobs and good firms†? agenda.

This paper studies the macroeconomic effect and underlying firm-level transmission channels of a reduction in business entry costs. We provide novel evidence on the response of firms' entry, exit, and employment decisions. To do so, we use as a natural experiment a reform in Portugal that reduced entry time and costs. Using the staggered implementation of the policy across the Portuguese municipalities, we find that the reform increased local entry and employment by, respectively, 25% and 4.8% per year in its first four years of implementation. Moreover, around 60% of the increase in employment came from incumbent firms expanding their size, with most of the rise occurring among the most productive firms. Standard models of firm dynamics, which assume a constant elasticity of substitution, are inconsistent with the expansionary and heterogeneous response across incumbent firms. We show that in a model with heterogeneous firms and variable markups the most productive firms face a lower demand elasticity and expand their employment in response to increased entry.

Rapidly changing technology, the globalization of markets, and the declining role of unions are just some of the factors that have led to dramatic changes in working conditions in the United States. Little attention has been paid to the difficult measurement problems underlying analysis of the labor market. Labor Statistics Measurement Issues helps to fill this gap by exploring key theoretical and practical issues in the measurement of employment, wages, and workplace practices. Some of the chapters in this volume explore the conceptual issues of what is needed, what is known, or what can be learned from existing data, and what needs have not been met by available data sources. Others make innovative uses of existing data to analyze these topics. Also included are papers examining how answers to important questions are affected by alternative measures used and how these can be reconciled. This important and useful book will find a large audience among labor economists and consumers of labor statistics.

Uzbekistan has achieved sustained growth through its gradual transition to a market-based economy through cautious economic policy reforms. Despite its gradual approach to development challenges, the country experienced the smallest output decline among former Soviet economies and enjoyed high rates of economic growth from 2004 to 2015, largely driven by the high prices of its major export commodities. However, the drop in the global prices of many key commodities in recent years have severely impacted Uzbekistan's economy. Under these circumstances, the new government introduced major reforms. The pace of reform is unprecedented. The government has formulated its long-term economic strategy in its Vision 2030, which aims to double the country's gross domestic product by 2030 through a program of economic diversification. This book analyzes how Uzbekistan can boost sustainable economic growth to create more and better jobs. It considers how the country can consolidate achievements from recent policy reforms and maintain reform efforts to accelerate sustainable growth. Policy recommendations cover fostering macroeconomic stability, increasing investment in physical infrastructure, enhancing human capital, improving firms' access to finance, and lowering barriers to international trade and foreign investment inflows.

Over the past decade, the United States has been very successful atcreating jobs. Some other industrial countries have clearly lagged behind. But what is the reason why some countries are more successful than others at creating employment? Are there common factors that explainjob creation? This paper presents the findings of a new IMF study that has systematically analyzed job creation over the past two decades in theindustrial countries, focusing particularly on differences within Europe.