October 24, 2015 is World Development Information Day, established in 1975 by the UN to raise global awareness of development problems and the need to strengthen international cooperation to solve them. In its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN wants to ensure that “all human beings can fulfil their potential in dignity and equality and in a healthy environment.” They propose to do this through 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which, if backed internationally, will transform the world into one without inequality and poverty. According to the UN and the ILO, the time to act is now.

Social protection policies have a role to play here, as they can be a tool for boosting human capital and supporting inclusive growth. Our author Lisa Cameron highlights the pressing need to design social protection programs to benefit poor women in developing countries. Women are more likely than men to work in the informal sector and to drop out of the labor force for a time, often due to childbirth. Although many developing countries have introduced social protection programs to protect those in poverty, the programs are generally less accessible to women than to men despite the often greater need of women. Visit IZA World of Labor for more articles on labor economics and development.

• Do case workers really help the unemployed? Read an interview with Michael Rosholm, our newly appointed Subject Editor for Program Evaluation, on whether he believes case workers are successful at bringing people back into employment. 
• Why do some European countries do more than others to help refugees? How can European leaders make policies that work? Tim Hatton explains his theories on the refugee crisis, and how Europe needs a common asylum policy now more than ever. 
• Empowering women in agriculture is “crucial” to developing economies achieving their economic potential, according to the European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Phil Hogan. 

• In his article Class size: Does it matter for student achievement?, Christopher Jepsen finds that although smaller classes are associated with increased student achievement, a few high-quality studies find no relationship. He concludes that other education policies such as tutoring, early childhood programs, or improving teacher quality would be better investments. 
• Wage subsidies designed to compensate for the gap between the pay and productivity of older workers, which may discourage the likelihood of them being hired, have been found to be mainly ineffective by Bernhard Boockmann in his article The effects of wage subsidies for older workers.
• Recent evidence shows that participation in active labor market programs reduces crime among unemployed young men, writes Torben Tranaes in his new article Active labor market policies and crime. These effects could explain why it is the income-redistributing countries with greater income equality that spend the most on active labor market programs. 

Visit the IZA World of Labor site for more concise, informative, evidence-based articles across the spectrum of labor economics.

• 1st IZA/DFID GLM-LIC Research Conference on New Research on Labor Markets in Low-Income Countries, October 22–24, Washington DC, USA
• IZA/Ministry of Finance, Slovak Republic (IFP)/Council for Budget Responsibility (CBR)/CELSI Conference on Fiscal Policy Tools and Labor Markets during the Great Recession, October 26–27, Bratislava, Slovakia
• CEDEFOP/IZA Workshop on Skills and Skill Mismatch, October 29–30, Cedefop, Thessaloniki, Greece