In this paper, we provide evidence on mentoring as a way to ease the labour market integration of youth with a migration background. To do so, we designed a survey and collected information from ...mentees of a Belgian mentoring programme (DUO for a JOB). Our results show that the mentoring programme covers different topics. Some topics, such as gaining self-confidence, serve nearly all mentees, while the preference for other topics depends on specific mentee characteristics. Overall, every youth with a migration background can benefit from the mentoring programme, irrespective of their education or migration background.
Public infrastructure has long been faced with difficulty in financing. Available public resources are often limited in many countries. Competitive bidding in public procurement systems is an ...important instrument to contain the public investment costs. But competition is often limited in the infrastructure sector. In such circumstances, better public procurement design can save a lot of public resources. There is a general tradeoff between the competition effect and economies of scale and scope; large contracts can benefit from the scale and scope effects but have to compromise competition. The unbundling approach can foster competition but may suffer from diseconomies of scale and scope. Using procurement data from water supply and sewage projects in developing countries, the paper analyzes the effects of the (un)bundling strategy on bidders’ entry and bidding behavior. It shows that the bidder cost structure exhibits significant diseconomies of scope between two main public works in this sector, i.e., treatment plant construction and distribution network installation. There is no clear evidence of the competition effect. Therefore, there is no rationale of bundling these two works into a single contract. Unbundling can help governments to contain public infrastructure costs.
► About 884 million people live without safe water, 2.6 billion people without sanitation. ► Yet, available public resources are often limited in many countries. ► Better procurement planning can save a lot of public resources. ► It is shown that the bundled procurement approach is costly in water supply and sewage projects. ► Unbundling can help governments to contain public infrastructure costs.
This paper shows that ignoring the political relevance of labor and social policies can lead to the failure of an industrial policy designed to modernize an economy. Our analysis is based on a simple ...model of a two-sector economy (one old and one new) in which policy decisions are adopted under a majority rule. This model suggests that unless, (i) the labor policy ensures that workers have enough bargaining power to give them an incentive to find a job matching their skills in a restructured economy and (ii) the government adopts a social policy compensating the losers of the industrial policy, the new sector is unlikely to develop. Moreover, we find that the credibility of the commitments made drives the effectiveness of the coordination of the three policy elements.
Infrastructure and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa analyzes the extent to which, how, and how fast the infrastructure needs of the poor have been met in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).
Abstract
The vast majority of international migrants from developing countries are of working age. And yet, their integration in the formal local labor market of their host countries continues to be ...a challenge. This paper reviews the scope of mentoring programs as a more systematic policy instrument to facilitate the integration of migrants into the labor market. It synthesizes the multidisciplinary academic research on mentoring. The review highlights the diversity of outcomes indicators and the relevance of context in the choice of mentoring program design. Determinants of success include the personal characteristics of the mentee and of the mentor and the efforts to match them but also the efforts made to account for the human, institutional, financial, and political context in the overall design of programs. Despite the significant progress achieved in understanding the determinants of mentoring effectiveness, the survey shows that there are still many sources of uncertainty on the optimal design of mentoring programs. This justifies a research agenda in a field with growing and significant political and social prominence of direct relevance to both developed and developing countries.
Several studies have compared the efficiency of publicly and privately owned water utilities and reached conflicting conclusions on the impact of ownership on efficiency. This article provides ...further evidence by estimating a stochastic cost frontier for a sample of Asian and Pacific regional water companies. The results show that efficiency is not significantly different in private companies than in public ones.
This study assesses the potential for job creation through infrastructure investment in the Middle East and North Africa. The region has experience in making the most of infrastructure investments, ...but maintaining and spreading the momentum in infrastructure will be important to support future growth and job creation. To do so, policymakers will have to recognize that there are large differences in initial conditions across the region in terms of starting stock, needs, fiscal commitments, private sector participation and job creation potential. Overall, the regions infrastructure needs through 2020 are quite large and estimated at about 106 billion dollars per year or 6.9 percent of the annual regional GDP. The differences in infrastructure and maintenance needs across sub-regions are also impressive, with developing oil exporters expected to require almost 11 percent of their GDP annually, while the oil importing countries and the GCC oil exporters expected to need approximately 6 and 5 percent of their GDP, respectively. Investment and rehabilitation needs are likely to be especially high in the electricity and transport sectors, particularly roads. Rehabilitation needs are expected to account for slightly more than half of total infrastructure needs. While oil exporters will be able to meet their national infrastructure needs if they maintain investment spending at rates prevailing in the 2000s, oil importers will fall short. The infrastructure sector has the potential to contribute to employment creation in MENA. The region could generate 2.0 million direct jobs and 2.5 million direct, indirect and induced infrastructure-related jobs just by meeting estimated, annual investment needs. However, the potential varies greatly across countries, and infrastructure alone will not resolve MENAs unemployment problem. Going forward, decisions on what
types of public spending to expand and what to downsize in order to achieve balanced budgets will have important implications for jobs. In designing country specific solutions, governments will have to tackle predictable challenges: the governance of job creation, the proper targeting and fiscal costs assessment of subsidies needed to create jobs, the design and fiscal costs of the (re)training programs needed and the expectations on the job creation effects of infrastructure.
This paper shows how measures of relative efficiency performance could promote yardstick competition between port infrastructure operators. The illustration is based on a study of the efficiency ...effects of the Mexican 1993 Port Reform. It covers 1996–99 and relies on a stochastic production frontier to show that Mexico's ports achieved 2.8–3.3% average annual efficiency gains since reform. The port-specific measures point to consistent leaders and laggards which would not all be identified by common partial productivity indicators. This information could be built into an explicit incentive-based regulatory regime aiming at promoting catch-up by laggards.
Cost inefficiencies in public procurement tend to come from two sources: corruption (moral hazard) and incompetence (adverse selection). In most countries, audit authorities are responsible for ...monitoring costs but do not distinguish both sources of inefficiency in their audits. Judicial courts typically rely on these cost audits, but only sanction corruption. In a model of public procurement by politicians, we study how the respective quality of the two courts affects corruption as well as cost efficiency. We find that while better courts have the direct effect of decreasing corruption, they may have a negative indirect effect on the abilities of the pool of politicians, so that the net effect on cost efficiency is ambiguous.
•It is difficult to disentangle corruption from incompetence in procurement.•Most countries combine accounting and judicial courts to assess politicians.•Accounting courts assess cost efficiency while judicial courts assess honesty.•Courts of better quality may have the effect to decrease the quality of politicians.•The impact of any policy depends of the quality of the pool of active politicians.
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