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Employment and Development: How Work Can Lead From and Into Poverty

Online ISBN:
9780191853166
Print ISBN:
9780198815501
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Employment and Development: How Work Can Lead From and Into Poverty

Gary S. Fields,
Gary S. Fields

Professor of Economics and John P. Windmuller Chair of International and Comparative Labor

Professor of Economics and John P. Windmuller Chair of International and Comparative Labor, Cornell University
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Janneke Pieters (ed.)
Janneke Pieters
(ed.)
Development Economics Group, Wageningen University
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Published online:
21 February 2019
Published in print:
6 December 2018
Online ISBN:
9780191853166
Print ISBN:
9780198815501
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The world is plagued by a plethora of economic problems, which is why economics is sometimes called “the dismal science”. Two of these problems are at the core of this volume. One is the huge extent of global poverty: Three billion poor people are nearly half of humanity. The second challenge highlighted in this book is the global employment (not: unemployment) problem. Although there are 200 million people in the world who are unemployed using standard international definitions, a much larger number – 900 million – are working poor. Gary S. Fields tries to answer two “big questions”: Who benefits from economic growth, and who is hurt by economic decline? How do developing countries’ labor markets work? The IZA Prize Laureate summarizes the empirical knowledge that is most relevant to understanding these questions; he shows how to bring together what we know into realistic, yet parsimonious, theoretical models of what is happening; he specifies the policy evaluation criteria to be used in assessing the effects of actual or prospective policy interventions; and he brings together empirical knowledge, theoretical models, and policy evaluation criteria to reach welfare economic judgments about what should or should not be done.

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