In many countries, the authorities turn a blind eye to minimum wage laws that they have themselves passed. But if they are not going to enforce a minimum wage, why have one? Or if a high minimum wage is not going to be enforced one hundred percent, why not have a lower one in the first place?...

This paper develops a theory of employment guarantees when labor markets are imperfect and when the credibility of government policy announcements could be in doubt. The basic feature of an EGS is that any individual who satisfies a set of specified criteria is guaranteed public employment at a...

Can an increase in male wages make the woman in the family, or even the whole family, worse off? On the face of it, this seems paradoxical, since the overall resources of the household are improved by the wage increase. This paper shows that the chain reactions set in motion by such a wage...

A group of development analysts – researchers, activists, and practitioners - engaged in an unusual exercise in early 2004. They had a dialogue about labor market, trade and poverty issues, but they preceded the dialogue with exposure to the realities of the lives of six remarkable women in...

This paper surveys the main income distribution implications of greater openness in the African context. It considers trade, capital flows, technology, risk, and the ethnic dimension. It argues that the central policy dilemma for African policy makers is how to take advantage ofthe undoubted...

Little empirical work has quantified the transitory effects of macroeconomic shocks on farm-level production behavior. We develop a simple analytical model to explain how macroeconomic shocks might temporarily divert managerial attention, thereby affecting farm-level productivity, but perhaps to...