Gregory Randolph

Following the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the challenges of reconstruction and high out-migration must be leveraged as opportunities to create just jobs.

This research project explores how good city governance can leverage urban economies to create more and better jobs.

The relationship between urbanization and economic growth may actually be tenuous, and the relationship with formal economy job creation even more so. This is particularly true of newly urban and rapidly urbanizing regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

With most of India's job-hungry youth residing in rural areas, and most of its job creation happening in cities, the country must design its cities to cope with "and welcome" internal migrants.

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.

In the world's fourth-largest country, Indonesia, the number of annual regular migrants has increased from less than 100,000 in 1990 to about 500,000 in 2013. But is the pursuit of migration as a development strategy supporting economic, social, and political empowerment in communities of origin?

All the world's successful industrial policies "those that have delivered the best wages, working conditions and opportunities for economic mobility" have made diversification a central aim. Countries like Bangladesh must do the same.

Promoting just jobs and economic mobility in Africa helps President Obama fulfill the promise he made last year. It also creates new opportunities for investment and new markets for American products and services in a region of almost a billion people.

India's new prime minister needs to focus on policies that create inclusive economic growth.

The United States must put policymaking and legislative muscle behind good job creation. As the president himself noted in the State of the Union address, "The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by; let alone to get ahead. And too many still aren't working at all."