Fairtrade has spread under the promise that it has the power to lift poor smallholder farmers out of poverty by providing them with technical assistance, credit, and better prices for their crops. Fairtrade is also viewed as a niche market for high value products in a context of globalisation and trade liberalisation policies that affect…
Fairtrade, Labour Markets and Women’s Economic Empowerment in Ethiopia
The Formal-Informal Labour Nexus and Growth
Although employment in low-income countries (LICs) is strikingly concentrated in the informal sector, the contribution of this sub-economy to the larger economy is not well understood. The traditional view holds that labour markets are segmented; the informal sector provides subsistence income, or a pool of surplus labour for the formal sector, and will likely disappear…
Empowering Women through Public Policy
In 2005, India’s Parliament passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a landmark in social protection legislation for the country. The Act moved employment into the domain of legally enforceable rights for a population no less than 120 million, making it the largest work/welfare programme in the world. Since 2009, the eponymous anti-poverty programme has…
Labour Markets and Household Enterprises
It is a general tenet of economic theory that competitive markets, supported by adequate infrastructure and institutions, do a better job of determining prices and allocating resources than do large-scale government planning programmes. In the structural adjustment era of the 1980s-90s, this belief underpinned a historic shift away from central planning and toward market liberalisation…
Reducing Extreme Poverty through Skill Training for Industry Job Placement
Bangladesh has been experiencing remarkable growth in the ready-made garments (RMG) industries for the last three decades. It has become an integral and major part of Bangladesh’s economy, which contributes 13 percent of GDP and 75 percent of export earnings. For instance, in 1983 there were some forty thousand people employed in RMG sector; since…
Globalization and the Gender Gap
The third Millennium Development Goal is to “Promote gender equality and empower women.” This goal is given some urgency by the fact that significant gender gaps remain, especially in the Low-Income countries (LICs). The World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report, “Gender Equality and Development,” stressed that in the LICs women lag behind men in a…
Girls Empowered by Microfranchising
Integrating young adults into the formal labour market is a major challenge facing developing nations, particularly in Africa (World Bank 2007). High levels of unemployment, especially among youth, have led many policymakers to advocate microfinance (cf Yunus 1999) and other forms of credit market expansion aimed at promoting entrepreneurship. However, empirical evidence on the overall…
Public Works Programs and Farm Household Behaviour
Public Works Programs (PWPs) are important tools for social protection. There are 167 PWPs in 29 sub-Saharan Africa. There are short term and long term PWPs. Short term PWPs can stabilise consumption in response to individual or aggregate shocks. Long term programs, on the other hand, are forms of insurance. However, there is little evidence…
Food Constraints and “Ganyu” Labour
Small-scale farming continues to be the principal source of employment and income for a majority of the population in low income countries. Zambia is no exception: in 2008, 80% of employment was in agriculture. Even though Zambia has recently been re- classified as lower middle income country primarily due to its large copper and cobalt…
How do Labour Markets Equilibrate?
Migrants have long been thought to play a central role in helping an economy to make efficient use of its resources. That migration acts as a force of arbitrage– that it takes place, that it encourages equilibrium, and that it leads to an efficient allocation of resources – is one of the central tenets of…
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