Severance pay, a program that provides compensation to workers on termination of employment, is the most widely used income protection program for the unemployed-yet it is often blamed for creating economic inefficiencies such as reducing employment and limiting access to jobs for disadvantaged groups. Reforming Severance Pay: An International Perspective fills the knowledge gap in evaluating the international experience by providing a collection of worldwide overviews and labor market impact assessments, theoretical analyses, and country case studies. The authors summarize the performance of existing severance pay arrangements around the world and discuss recent innovative severance pay reforms in Austria, Chile, and the Republic of Korea. Reforming Severance Pay proposes policy directions based on country characteristics such as folding severance pay of higher income countries into existing social insurance programs and making severance pay a contractual affair between market partners to live up to the efficiency-enhancing device in a knowledge-based economy. For lower income countries, the authors advise reforming severance pay toward realistic benefit levels, strengthening compliance of benefit payments by the employer, and safeguarding minimum benefits. This report will be of interest to policy makers and researchers working on labor market, unemployment benefit, and pension issues; economic policy reform; poverty reduction; and social analysis and policy.

Termination pay includes severance, mass redundancy, or end-of-service pay and is widely used as income protection for the unemployed. This book reviews such arrangements wordwide, analyzing their performance and recent reform trends to improve efficiency and redistributive impact.

Papers presented at the Conference on Regulation, Deregulation and Reregulation, held at Singapore during 22-24 March 2004.

Compensation is a systematic approach to providing monetary value and other benefits to employees in exchange for their work and service. But pay and conditions becomes a more complicated issue for multinational companies which operate across different locations and cultures, and who employ an increasingly diverse range of personnel. This unique new text gives in-depth analysis of the key themes and emerging topics faced by global enterprises when dealing with compensation issues. The first section, ‘Foundation Concepts’, looks at the design of compensation packages for a number of different employee groups; from supply chain management to research and development, as well as ethical considerations when dealing with a global context, and the concept of performance related pay. The second section, ‘Global Applications’, looks at current debates in the field, including the influence of national cultures on compensation schemes, discrepancies in CEO pay, and contrasts in wages between industry types. Part of Routledge’s Global HRM, this is is an invaluable text for any student of HRM, Business and Management, or any practitioner working in this area.

South Asia has created nearly 800,000 jobs per month during the last decade. Robust economic growth in large parts of the region has created better jobs -- those that pay higher wages for wage workers and reduce poverty for the self-employed, the largest segment of the region s employed. Going forward, South Asia faces the enormous challenge of absorbing 1 to 1.2 million entrants to the labor force every month for the next two decades at rising levels of productivity. This calls for an agenda that cuts across sectors and includes improving the reliability of electricity supply for firms in both urban and rural settings, dealing decisively with issues of governance and corruption, making access to land easier for urban informal firms and strengthening transport links between rural firms and their markets. It requires improving nutrition in early childhood to avoid cognitive impairment, intensifying the focus on quality of learning in education systems, equipping workers with the skills that employers demand, and reorienting labor market regulations and programs to protect workers rather than jobs. The continuance of high economic growth to help improve job quality is not assured. But the region s demography can provide a favorable tailwind. The growth of workers exceeds that of dependents in much of the region. The resources saved from having fewer dependents can be shifted to high-priority investments in physical and human capital accumulation necessary to create productive jobs in countries with an enabling policy framework. But the demographic window of opportunity is open for only the next three decades, a fact which lends urgency to the reform agenda. This book will be of interest to policy makers, their advisers, researchers and students of economics who seek solutions, not only to the challenge of creating more and better jobs in South Asia but globally as well. It is the first title in South Asia Development Matters,a new series that will serve as a vehicle for in-depth synthesis of economic and policy analysis on key development topics for South Asia.

In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

In Peru, as in many other developing countries, employers have the legal obligation to compensate workers who are dismissed through no fault of their own. Is this an efficient mechanism for providing income support to the unemployed? The authors seek an answer to this question, using individual records from a household survey with a panel structure. Relying on five coverage indicators, they show that roughly one in five workers in the private sector, and one in three wage earners in the private sector, is legally entitled to severance pay. Coverage is more prevalent among wealthier workers. Results based on several empirical strategies suggest that workers "pay" for their entitlement to severance pay through lower wages. Consumption among unemployed workers who receive severance pay is 20 to 30 percent greater than among those who do not. Consumption among these workers is actually higher than consumption among employed workers, suggesting that mandatory severance pay is overgenerous in Peru.

A region known for its volatility, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has suffered severe economic and social setbacks from crises—including the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises have taken their toll on careers, wage growth, and productivity. Employment in Crisis: The Path to Better Jobs in a Post-COVID-19 Latin America provides new evidence on the effects of crises on the region’s workers and firms and suggests several policy responses that can bolster long-term and inclusive economic growth. This report has three key findings. First, crises lead to persistent employment losses and accelerate structural changes away from the formal sector. This change occurs more through reductions in the creation of formal jobs than through job destruction. Second, some workers recover from crises, while others are permanently scarred by them. Low-skilled workers can suffer up to a decade of lower earnings caused by crises, while high-skilled workers rebound fast, exacerbating the LAC region’s high level of inequality. Formal workers suffer smaller employment and wage losses in localities with higher rates of informality. And the reduced job flows caused by crises decrease welfare, but workers in localities with more job opportunities, whether formal or informal, bounce back better. Third, crises’ cleansing effects can increase efficiency and productivity, but these effects are dampened by the LAC region’s less competitive market structure. Rather than becoming more agile and productive during economic downturns, protected sectors and firms gain market share and crowd out others, trapping valuable resources. This report proposes a three-pronged mix of policies to improve the LAC region’s responses to crises: •Create a more stable macroeconomic environment to smooth the impacts of crises, including automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and short-term compensation programs; •Increase the capacity of social protection and labor programs to respond to crises and coalesce these programs into systems that complement income support with reemployment assistance and reskilling opportunities; and •Tackle structural issues, including the lack of product market competition and the spatial dimension behind poor labor market adjustment—a “good jobs and good firms†? agenda.

Most countries implement social protection programs to help individuals manage risks such as unemployment, disability, illness, longevity or death. In many middle income countries, these are often based on a 'Bismarckian model' (named after Otto von Bismarck), where benefits are financed by contributions levied on salaried employment. In countries with a large informal sector, however, only a fraction of the population is covered by this system and non-contributory programs have been added or are planned to increase coverage. This can create distortions in the labor market, and the book is about policies to expand the coverage of social insurance programs to all workers, without reducing incentives to job creation and formal work. While few would argue against the need and social merits of social insurance and social assistance programs there are growing concerns about their unintended consequences on labor markets because of poor design. The programs can distort incentives and individual behaviors in ways that either reduce employment levels and/or promote informality, ultimately affecting productivity and economic performance. For instance, high social security contribution rates can reduce formal employment; badly designed unemployment benefits can reduce incentives to keep, search, and take jobs; and fragmented social assistance programs can become a tax on formal labor and encourage informality. The book reviews the evidence regarding the effects of social insurance and social assistance programs on labor market outcomes and discusses options to improve their design and implementation. The book focuses particularly on middle income countries in Latin America and Asia with a large informal sector and suggests ways to reduce these distortions and better manage and finance the subsidies to make coverage universal, while creating good jobs. The book compiles expert papers from the joint conferences of the World Bank (WB), the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on Employment and Development.