We present findings from an at-scale randomized trial of a government program providing public employment services in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with up-to-date vacancy information. Before the program, women with relatively less education searched more narrowly with worse labor market outcomes than the rest of our representative sample of relevant job seekers. These women also have lower direct intervention take-up than the rest of the sample. However, only these women significantly increase applications, receive more offers, shift from household enterprise work to wage employment, and experience higher earnings in response to the intervention. These employment impacts are larger than can be explained by vacancies directly curated through the intervention. Instead, these women adjust search behavior, expectations, and employment aspirations more broadly. Notably, offers come through friends and family networks, their modal baseline search method, underscoring the potential role of social networks in disseminating employment information to the most marginalized job seekers.

Many of the world's poor have experienced trauma. We argue that memories of this trauma interfere with the process of future simulation, diminishing the ability to see how actions today can improve outcomes tomorrow. We introduce guided mental experiencing (GME) -- an intervention in which participants mentally simulate pathways between their actions and desired economic outcomes -- as a response, and study GME's impact in two RCTs. In a population of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, GME increases the ability of refugees to see a positive future, increases their intent to stay in Ethiopia, increases labor force participation and improves self-reported welfare. In a population that has experienced violence and poverty in Colombia, a traditional entrepreneurial training program reduces the ability to imagine a future in business and worsens economic outcomes. Integrating GME into entrepreneurial training restores future thinking and removes these negative economic effects. The largest gains accrue to the most traumatized participants in our samples.

We propose to evaluate the impact of a gender debiasing program on hiring and training among formal firms in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As part of a large-scale government program that will connect low-skill youths to apprenticeships in local firms, firm managers participate in a series of workshops that address common cognitive biases that may lead to gender-biased treatment in the workplace: selection neglect, attribution bias, and environment design bias. By varying whether firms receive the training prior or after candidate selection, we can separately study how the program changes the selection and training of young workers. Using rich administrative data on firm preferences over different candidates and primary data that we collect through surveys and observation, we will study how the program affects cognitive biases among managers, firm hiring practices, and downstream outcomes of firms and apprentices.

74% of refugees live in protracted displacement, with the majority facing work restrictions. Governmental policies limiting refugee employment could be detrimental to both refugees and host communities, who have to support refugee populations while missing out on their contributions. This study aims to provide the first experimental evidence on refugee labor market integration. We partner with the Government of Ethiopia's Refugees and Returnees Service to randomize an intervention, which provides administrative support to refugees to obtain work permits and business licenses, across 16,000 refugees in four camps. We measure impacts across multiple domains: economic outcomes including employment status, hours worked, earnings, and consumption; labor market outcomes such as job search behavior, skills utilization, and formality; psychosocial outcomes including mental health, autonomy, and dignity; and integration outcomes spanning social networks, mobility, and interactions with host communities.

We analyze matched employee–employer data from Ethiopia’s largest special economic zone during a period of downsizing pressure from the COVID-19 world import demand shock. We observe substantial job displacement during the shock peak, particularly for new hires. These largely female and rural-to-urban migrants persistently “fall off the employment ladder”, remaining unemployed both within and outside the zone even after employers have recovered from the shock. We observe high levels of urban-centered food insecurity and depression symptoms during the crisis peak, regardless of employment status. Our findings highlight the importance of social protection policies within export-oriented development strategies.

In a globalized world, pandemics transmit impacts through markets. We document employment changes, coping strategies, and welfare of garment factory workers in Ethiopia’s largest industrial park during the early stages of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic. We field a phone survey of female workers during a two month period in which cases are rapidly rising globally, but not locally. Our data suggest significant changes in employment, high levels of migration away from urban areas to rural areas if women are no longer working, and high levels of food insecurity. These findings compel a research and policy focus on documenting and mitigating the market-reach of pandemics on low-income workers at the margins.

We use a field experiment to study how social image concerns affect a commonly used strategy to attract new donors: pledges to engage in a charitable activity. While waiting for their appointment, visitors to a local government office are offered sign-ups for blood donations in a crowded waiting room. We randomly vary the visibility of the pledge to donate and the organization for which blood donations are solicited (charitable vs. commercial). Our setting provides natural variation in who observes the pledge. We do not find that visibility increases pledges to donate. Exploring heterogeneity in treatment effects, we find that visibility increases pledges when participants are observed by friends or family. Almost all subjects renege on their pledge.

We argue that survey-based median household consumption expenditure (or income) per capita be incorporated into standard development indicators, as a simple, robust and durable indicator of typical individual material wellbeing in a country. Using household survey data available for low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's PovcalNet tool, we show that as a measure of income-related wellbeing, it is far superior to the commonly used GDP per capita as well as survey-based measures at the mean. We also argue that survey-based median measures are ‘distribution-aware’, i.e. when used as the denominator of various widely available indicators such as mean consumption expenditure per capita they provide a ‘good enough’ indicator of consumption (or income) inequality. Finally, as a post-2015 indicator of progress at the country-level in promoting shared development and reducing inequality, we propose that the rate of increase in median consumption per capita after taxes and transfers exceeds the rate of increase in average consumption in the same period.

We identify a group of people in Latin America that are not poor but not middle class either—namely “strugglers” in households with daily income per capita between $4 and $10 (at constant 2005 PPP). This group will account for about a third of the region’s population over the next decades; as the size and income of the middle class rises, they could become increasingly marginalized. The cash transfers they receive are largely offset by indirect taxes; the benefit of schooling and other in-kind transfers they receive is questionable after adjusting for quality. We discuss implications for the social contract.

This chapter considers economic development of sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of slow convergence of productivity, both across sectors and across firms within sectors. Why have “productivity enclaves,” islands of high productivity in a sea of smaller low-productivity firms, not diffused more rapidly? Three sets of factors are summarized and analyzed: first, the poor business climate, which constraints the allocation of production factors between sectors and firms. Second, the complex political economy of business–government relations in Africa’s small economies. Third, the distribution of firm capabilities. The roots for these factors lie in Africa’s geography and its distinctive history, including the legacy of its colonial period on state formation and market structure.

Substantial progress in the fight against extreme poverty was made in the past two decades. But the slowdown in global economic growth and significant increases in income inequality in many developed and developing countries raise serious concerns about the continuation of this trend into the twenty-first century. The time has come to think seriously about how improvements in official global governance, coupled with and reenforced by rising activism of “global citizens,” can lead to welfare-enhancing and more equitable results for global citizens through better national and international policies. This book examines the factors that are most likely to facilitate the process of beneficial economic growth in low-, middle-, and high-income countries. It shows that the legacies of the 2008-9 crisis-high unemployment, massive excess capacity, and high levels of debt-are likely to reduce the standard of living of millions of people in many countries over a long period of adjustment and that fluctuations in international trade, financial markets, and commodity prices, as well as the tendency of institutions at both the national and international level to favor the interests of the better-off and more powerful, pose substantial risks for citizens of all countries. The chapters on the future of economic, human capital and population, international trade, international finance, natural resources and climate change, and global economic governance and their policy implications are intended to stimulate public interest and facilitate the exchange of ideas and policy dialogue.