May 2021

China Population and Development Studies

By CPDRC, CPA This journal provides an international platform for discussions on topics related to various population phenomena and development issues, complemented by a strong representation of the research trend and achievement in China and other Asian countries. The journal, hosted by China Population and Development Research Center, draws on the energetic and resourceful Chinese research community as well as in close contact with the Asian research community in the area, features the Asian perspective on the field of population...

Aging and Wages of Older Workers in Japan

By Quoc Hung Nguyen We first theoretically argue that labor force aging leads to a fall in the relative wage of older workers based on the Tinbergen's labor supply-demand framework. Using data from Japan's Basic Survey on Wage Structure and Population Census across 47 prefectures, we then estimate that a 10% increase in the relative number of workers aged 55 and older leads to a fall in their corresponding relative wage in a range of 3.5% to 4.3%. This equivalently...

Integrating Social Insurance and Social Assistance Programs for the Future World of Labor

By Robert J. Palacios, David A. Robalino Given the prevalence of informal labor, most countries have combined contributory social insurance programs (pensions, unemployment benefits, and health insurance), with non-contributory insurance programs and several types of "safety nets." All of these programs involve different types of subsidies and taxes, sometimes implicit. Because of design problems and the lack of coordination/integration between programs, these subsidies/taxes tend to cause four problems: 1) they can reduce incentives to contribute to mandatory insurance programs and...

Labour Force Survey in the EU, EFTA, United Kingdom and candidate countries

By Eurostat This report describes the main characteristics of the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) conducted in 2019 in the Member States of the European Union (EU), three EFTA countries (Iceland, Norway and Switzerland), the United Kingdom and four candidate countries (Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey). All of these countries provide Eurostat with EU-LFS microdata. The purpose of this report is to inform about the technical features of the surveys carried out in these countries, in order to...

Does it Matter to be Informal? Type of employment and political opinions in the MENA region

By Anil Duman Informal activities are highly persistent in developing countries, and their economic effects are widely studied in the literature. Yet, political consequences of informality are relatively an understudied topic and big chunk of the existing work does not offer systematic examination of how informal sector participation shape preferences and attitudes. Our paper contributes to the literature by focusing on Arab countries that have very stable and large size of informal sectors in the world. Additionally, we take into...

April 2021

Financial Inclusion in Malaysia Distilling Lessons for Other Countries

By World Bank Group The World Bank Group’s current partnership with Malaysia is focused on knowledge-sharing. It is centered on support for Malaysia’s vision to join the ranks of high-income economies by 2020 through inclusive and sustainable growth, and to share its lessons with developing countries. In March 2016, the World Bank Group officially launched its Global Knowledge and Research Hub in Malaysia. The new Hub is the first of its kind, serving both as a field presence in Malaysia and...

Financial Inclusion Through Fintech in the Digital Economy

By Eunsook Seo, Kyeong-Won Yoo Since the 2008 global financial crisis, including the recent COVID 19 pandemic, low interest rates and low economic growth have continued around the world. In spite of this low interest rate trend, as the economic downturn prolongs, there is a situation of concern called the “new normal” of low interest rates and low economic growth, and low prices. In this new normal economic structure, the rapid progress of aging is increasing the necessity and desire...

Involuntary unemployment in overlapping generations model due to instability of the economy and fiscal policy

By Yasuhito Tanaka The existence of involuntary unemployment advocated by J. M. Keynes is a very important problem of the modern economic theory. Using a three-generations overlapping generations model, we show that the existence of involuntary unemployment is due to the instability of the economy. Instability of the economy is the instability of the difference equation about the equilibrium price around the full-employment equilibrium, which means that a fall in the nominal wage rate caused by the presence of involuntary...

Informal Sector in GDP: A Panel Estimation Method

By Nitesh Kansara, Gopal K. Basak, Pranab Kumar Das Estimation of the activities of the informal sector in an economy poses a serious problem for obtaining a correct estimate of GDP. This happens to be so because of the fact that informal sector activities are not registered. The literature has tried to solve the problem of estimation of the informal sector using the method of latent variables. The standard approach is generally aims to estimate for a single point. The present...

March 2021

Managing the Employment Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis: Policy Options for Relief and Restructuring

By Eliana Carranza, Thomas Farole, Ugo Gentilini, Matteo Morgandi, Truman Packard, Indhira Santos, and Michael Weber This note discusses policy options for managing the employment impacts of the COVID-19 crisis aimed at relief and restructuring. The relief phase corresponds to an initial COVID-19 phase when the health emergency dominates, lockdowns are common, and the focus is on saving lives, providing support to workers and households to manage the income shock and to firms to say afloat and, often retain workers;...