Results readiness in social protection and labor operations : technical guidance notes for labor markets task teams

Labor allocation to its most efficient use, promoting employment and human capital investment as well as functioning labor markets can contribute to long?term economic growth, poverty reduction and to help workers manage their risks. A labor market policy framework includes both regulations and programs. However, the optimal framework is not standard and universal but varies country by country depending on the level of economic and financial development, culture and other structural characteristics. Labor market projects are equally concentrated in Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Europe and Central Asia regions and one is China. Interestingly, the number of projects having'improving labor market'as the primary component has increased over time. All project development objectives in the cohort of projects reviewed focus on promoting higher employment and increasing economic opportunities as the main objective especially via training programs. About half of the projects also seek to reach specific vulnerable groups by improving targeting mechanisms and to improve the quality of social assistance services by reducing the cost of job search through access to enhanced employment services and by improving employability.Safety Nets and Transfers,Labor Markets,Labor Policies,Housing&Human Habitats,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis

Transport Problems and Disintegration Maps

By disintegration of transport plans it is introduced the notion of transport class. This allows to consider the Monge problem as a particular case of the Kantorovich transport problem, once a transport class is fixed. The transport problem constrained to a fixed transport class is equivalent to an abstract Monge problem over a Wasserstein space of probability measures. Concerning solvability of this kind of constrained problems, it turns out that in some sense the Monge problem corresponds to a lucky case

Aggregation functions: an approach using copulae

In this paper we present the extension of the copula approach to aggregation functions. In fact we want to focus on a class of aggregation functions and present them in the multilinear form with marginal copulae. Moreover, we define the joint aggregation density function.

Second-generation adolescents’ competencies and the role of integration policies

Immigration into the OECD countries has seen a sharp increase since the middle of the 1980s, even if not at a constant rate. Integration policies are a fundamental tool to help the newly arrived to integrate and assimilate with the native population. While the literature on the immigrants’ integration level is very rich for settlement countries (USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and for the few European countries that have a long tradition of immigration (Germany, UK, France), very little is yet known about other European economies that have only recently become destination countries. Indeed, the availability of data has made difficult to carry out comparative analysis of the integration process of immigrants in most of the EU countries, particularly for the second-generation. This research wants to fill this gap, analysing the role of the socio-economic background in the educational outcome of immigrants. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the effect of the socio-economic background is more or less pronounced in different EU countries that adopt different integration policies and have different education systems. In this work, we concentrate on second-generation adolescents and compare their performances with that of native adolescents and with that of first generation adolescents. The chosen indicator is the score obtained in the 2012 PISA test by each student (native, first and second-generation immigrant) in reading. We compare the results obtained for each of the EU15 member states and for the settlement countries. The results, in line with the prevalent literature, show a strong impact of the socio-economic background on the immigrant adolescents’ performances. The effect is weaker in those countries where the integration policies concern disadvantaged children since an early age

A copula-based approach to aggregation functions

This paper presents the role of copula functions in the theory of aggregation operators and an axiomatic characterization of Archimedean aggregation functions. In this context we are focusing our attention about several properties of aggregation functions, like supermodularity and Schur-concavity.Aggregation functions, supermodularity, Schur-concavity, copula, Archimedean copulae

Multivariate dependence modeling using copulas

There exist necessary and sufficient conditions on the generating functions of the FGM family, in order to obtain various dependence properties. We present multivariate generalizations of this class studying symmetry and dependence concepts, measuring the dependence among the components of each class and providing several examples.copula, density function, FGM copulas, dependence, symmetry

Corruption, business environment, and small business fixed investment in India

This paper estimates a structural dynamic business investment equation and an error correction model of fixed assets growth on a sample of predominantly small and mid-size manufacturers in India. The results suggest that excessive labor regulation, power shortages, and problems of access to finance are all significant factors in industrial growth in the country. The estimated effects of labor regulation, power shortages and access to finance on the rate of business investment all vary by states'levels of industrial development and. Perhaps more importantly, they also depend on a fourth institutional factor, namely, corruption. The rate of fixed investment is significantly lower where power shortages are more severe and labor regulation is stronger over the full sample, but each of these impacts is also greater for businesses self-reportedly affected by corruption. Although access to finance does not seem to influence the rate of investment for most firms, there is evidence that investment decisions are constrained by cash flow in enterprises that are unaffected by corruption or power shortages. There are nuances to this story as we take into account regional specificity, but the key result always holds that labor regulation, power shortages and access to finance influence the rate of fixed investment in ways that depend on the incidence of corruption. In interpreting this finding, we would like to think of corruption as a proxy for the quality of property rights institutions in the sense of Acemoglu and Johnson (2005). On the other hand, we regard labor regulation and the financial environment of small businesses in India as instances of what Acemoglu and Johnson (2005) call'contracting institutions'. The analysis finds that the interaction between corruption and other aspects of the institutional environment of fixed investment decisions could be seen consistent with the Acemoglu-Johnson view that the quality of property rights institutions exerts more abiding influence on economic outcomes than the quality of contracting institutions.Access to Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Emerging Markets,Labor Markets

Informality among formal firms : firm-level, cross-country evidence on tax compliance and access to credit

The authors use firm-level, cross-county data from Investment Climate surveys in 49 developing countries to investigate an important channel through which informality can affect productivity: access to credit and external finance. Informality is measured as self-reported lack of tax compliance in a sample of registered firms that also answered questions on a large set of other characteristics. The authors find that more tax compliance is significantly associated with more access to credit both in OLS and in country fixed effects estimates. In particular, the link between credit and formality is stronger in high-formality countries. This suggests that firms'balance sheets are relatively more informative for financial institutions in environments where signal extraction is a less noisy process. The authors'results are robust to the inclusion of a wide array of correlates and to two-stage estimation.Access to Finance,,Banks&Banking Reform,Debt Markets,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress