OECD countries are rapidly aging – their working age populations are shrinking, while their elderly populations are growing. This has significant fiscal and economic implications for these societies, yet thus far there has been no serious policy response. In this blog, Lant Pritchett explores these historically unprecedented and largely ignored trends.
Welcome to the Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP) blog! LaMP is a new organization currently incubating at the Center for Global Development. LaMP aims to be the first organization which actively works to increase rights-respecting labor mobility, creating opportunities for needed workers to fill jobs abroad while unlocking billions in income gains.
This post was first published at the Center for Global Development
To combat a “super-aging” society, Japan plans to admit 500,000 foreign workers by 2025. But the country faces significant implementation gaps, which could be solved through contracting work out.
This post was first published at the Center for Global Development.
Untying’ work permits can reduce workers’ vulnerabilities, strengthen their wages, and improve employer productivity. But these benefits can only be realized if practical barriers to changing employers are removed. Here, we describe how.
Originally published here with the Center for Global Development
Decades of programmatic experimentation by development NGOs combined with the latest empirical techniques for estimating program impact have shown that a well-designed, well-implemented, multi-faceted intervention can in fact have an apparently sustained impact on the incomes of the poor (Banerjee et al 2015). The magnitude of the income gains of the “best you can do” via direct interventions to raise the income of the poor in situ is about 40 times smaller than the income gain from allowing people from those same poor countries to work in a high productivity country like the USA. Simply allowing more labor mobility holds vastly more promise for reducing poverty than anything else on the development agenda. That said, the magnitude of the gains from large growth accelerations (and losses from large decelerations) are also many-fold larger than the potential gains from directed individual interventions and the poverty reduction gains from large, extended periods of rapid growth are larger than from targeted interventions and also hold promise (and have delivered) for reducing global poverty.
This post was first published at the Center for Global Development.
Workers with equal intrinsic productivity make higher wages working in a more productive place.
