2019 Jobs & Development Conference

IZA / World Bank / NJD Jobs and Development Conference

Following the success of the 2016 and 2018 Jobs and Development Conferences in Washington DC and Bogotá, the World Bank  in collaboration with IZA (Institute of Labor Economics) and the Network on Jobs and Development are organizing a follow up conference focused on “Improving Jobs Outcomes in Developing Countries.”

To expand the frontiers of global knowledge around jobs and advance the discussion on the most effective policies, we are interested in papers that focus on:

• Increasing wage labor demand;
• Creating jobs in the formal sector of the economy, including mobilizing capital for private sector development, SMEs, and value chains;
• Improving the quality of informal jobs and increasing earnings of self-employed and informal workers;
• Overcoming structural mismatches and facilitating market transitions through education, skills, and other active labor market programs;
• Developing social protection systems to increase security and promote income development (strategies for economic inclusion; the roles of transfers and job guarantee programs);
• Understanding the future of jobs in services (such as caring, health, education, cultural services and business process outsourcing) in low income countries (LICs);
• Understanding the relationship between technological progress, technology adoption, and labor demand;
• Improving access to jobs for vulnerable or traditionally disadvantaged groups such as women, youth, refugees and IDPs, and people living in fragile, conflict and violent (FCV) contexts;
• Gender dimensions of jobs in LICs (including the challenge of increasing the rate of female labor force participation);
• Ways to reduce spatial mismatches and facilitate labor migration; and
• Theoretical models to understand the drivers of jobs outcomes in developing countries

The conference will feature these two keynote speakers:

Daron Acemoglu (MIT): “Productivity, Work and Wages: Lessons for Developed and Developing Economies”

Ricardo Hausmann (Harvard University): “Growth Diagnostics and Jobs”

Please submit full papers or extended abstracts by January 15, 2019 using our online application form.  Notifications on contributed papers will be sent by February 28, 2019.

Any queries can be emailed to Dominik Spitza at Spitza@iza.org.

We strongly encourage submission of full papers. For extended abstracts, full paper submission is due April 1, 2019.

IZA – Institute of Labor Economics – Gary Fields and Ahmed Elsayed
The World Bank – Ian Walker and Yolaina Montoya
The Network on Jobs and Development (NJD)  – Albert Park and Piotr Lewandowski

Authors of accepted papers are expected to participate in the whole two-day conference. The conference will provide hotel accommodation for up to 3 nights only (June 5-7, 2019) and meals during the event. Travel expenses (including flights, visas and airport transfers, etc.) will not be reimbursed by the organizers.