Gladys Lopez-Acevedo – författare

Governments around the world face ongoing pressures from citizens to provide more and better services, and to do this while restraining taxation levels. This provides the context for government efforts to ensure their policies and programs are as effective, and as efficient, as possible. An emphasis on government performance has led a number of governments to create formal systems for monitoring and evaluating their performance-on a regular, planned, and systematic basis - with the objective of improving it.The focus of this book is on these government monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems: what they comprise, how they are built and managed, and how they can be used to improve government performance.

Sewing Success? Employment, Wages, and Poverty following the End of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) analyzes the impact of the 2004 MFA phaseout on key social indicators in major apparel-exporting developing countries. This study provides important policy insights on how to maximize the poverty-reduction potential of the apparel industry in a post-MFA environment:The significant post-MFA reallocation of production across countries did not necessarily match predictions. Wage differences explain some of the production shifts, but domestic policies targeting the apparel industry, ownership type, and functional upgrading of the industry also played important roles.Using exports as a metric of success in terms of reducing poverty is insufficient. Falling exports usually meant a loss of opportunities for low-income workers, but rising exports did not always benefit poor workers. Rising global competition may induce a shift toward higher-value production and services that are often less labor- and female-intensive.Post-MFA apparel workers experienced changes in both short- and long-run wage components as well as employment. It is important to understand these different determinants of poverty.Countries that actively promoted industry upgrading or established a niche position experienced larger increases in exports. Since upgrading does not always correspond to increases in employment or wages, it is also crucial to develop worker skills and improve working conditions.In short, export and economic growth alone are not enough; the composition of growth also matters. Poverty falls if employment or wages increase for the people at the lower end of the income distribution, and countries that experience growth in labor-intensive sectors are more likely to reduce poverty.This book will be of interest to academics, policy makers, and decision makers in nongovernmental organizations who work in the areas of international trade, development, and poverty.

The apparel sector in South Asia is labor-intensive, employs more women on average than other manufacturing sectors, and provides jobs that allow for the acquisition of skills. Despite these development benefits, this book finds that the sector has not reached its full potential due to inefficiencies that affect its competitiveness.

South Asia has a huge need to create more and better jobs for a growing population– especially in the manufacturing industries where it is underperforming as compared to East Asia. The report examines three critical and relatively understudied drivers of competitiveness:Economies of agglomeration: firms and workers accrue benefits from locating close together in cities or clusters through urbanization and localization.Participation in global value chains: stronger competitive pressures weed out least productive firms while others improve by gaining access to new knowledge and better inputs.Firm capabilities: to operate close to what would be considered optimum efficiency levels given the prevailing factor prices and thus employ South Asia’s abundant labour.The report shows that South Asia has great untapped competitiveness potential. Realizing this potential would require the governments in the region to pursue second generation trade policy reforms for firms to better contribute to and benefit from global value chains (e.g. facilitating imports for exporters), to facilitate the development of industrial clusters in secondary cities (cheaper and less congested than the metros) as well as to deploy policies to improve the capabilities of firms.

This report breaks new ground on issues crucial for Morocco's development. It analyzes the pace and sources of growth, regional patterns of structural transformation, drivers of formalization, and inclusion of subgroups of the working age population in the labor market.

To enable global trade to deliver for the poor, this report makes contributions to improve the ability of trade to deliver for the poor.

Pre-pandemic the Middle East and North Africa was the only region in the world experiencing increases in poverty and declines in life satisfaction. This Report investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the welfare of individuals and households in the region, by relying on phone surveys and micro-simulation exercises.

This report shifts the paradigm of how we think of women's participation in the labor force by demonstrating the importance of the distinction between jobs and careers and analyzing how an apparel-led export strategy contributes to the transition.

This book focuses on studying Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, estimating the impact of trade policy on exports and their relationship with local labor market outcomes. The book suggests that trade has successfully boosted trade flows, but the benefits from this have not necessarily yielded better labor market outcomes and have not been equally shared.