Income and Wages

From the recent experience in Myanmar, Adithya B. Kumar from CESD and Tanja Matheis from JJN, discuss the process of reaching consensus on minimum wage rates and how research organizations can help to facilitate fact-based decision making among stakeholders.

Prakash Loungani, Chief of Development Macroeconomics at the IMF Research Department, writes about the gap in IMF's existing policy framework, with respect to concerns about technology-induced job losses in the short-run, and provides key recommendations aimed at harnessing the long-run benefits of technology adoption.

The 10-chapter volume examines a rich diversity of wage-related policy issues from around the world: wage inequality in Brazil; minimum wage setting in decentralized Indonesia; the gender dimensions of agricultural wages in India; and the impact of state-level minimum wages in the United States, among other topics.

This report analyses and contextualizes the wage developments in the garment industry in five Asian countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

This report discusses the political economy of minimum wage setting that has developed in Indonesia and seeks to examine the changing role of workers, employers, and local governments.

This report seeks to provide clarity on the topic of minimum wage legislation by contextualizing the debate and detailing sector-specific empirical evidence of minimum wage legislation's impact in South Africa given the country's unique historical, social and economic context.

What role did a rising minimum wage play in reducing wage inequality in Brazil in the first decade of the 21st century? Is it reasonable to expect that the policy of tying minimum wage to economic growth will continue to act as a key driver of inequality reduction in the near future?

America's working class families have witnessed a daunting trend over the last 30 years– one marked by wage stagnation and rising costs. Worker productivity rose by nearly 65 percent, yet American workers saw their wages remain stagnant in real terms, and in some cases, even decline.

This report gives an overview of current- minimum-wage setting mechanisms in European countries and looks more specifically at why statutory minimum wage is causing such controversies in some of the countries that have the strongest trade unions in Europe.

Corporate codes of conduct that only commit companies to pay minimum or market wages to their workers have proven– in most key sourcing countries– insufficient in the task of ensuring workers are fairly compensated. To do their share, global brands must commit to a higher standard than just paying minimum wages.