This book brings together the contributions of 2014 IZA Prize in Labor Economics award winner Gary Fields to address global employment and poverty problems. The central questions in his work are how economic growth affects standards of living, how labor markets work in developing countries, and how different labor market policies affect well-being.

• Part I: Introduction by the Editor


• Part II: Introduction by the Author


• Part III: Setting the Framework


• 1: Aid, Growth, and Jobs: A Five Part Policy Framework


• 2: The Distributional Effects of Economic Growth


• 3: How the Poor are Working


• Part IV: Modelling Labor Markets and the Effects of Labor Market Policies


• 4: Rural-Urban Migration, Urban Unemployment and Underemployment, and Job Search Activity in LDCs


• 5: On-the-Job Search in a Labor Market Model


• 6: A Welfare Economic Approach to Growth and Distribution in the Dual Economy


• 7: Labor Market Modeling and the Urban Informal Sector


• 8: Changes over Time in Individual Countries


• Part V: Assessing Changes in Income Distribution


• 9: On Inequality Comparisons


• 10: Do Inequality Measures Measure Inequality?


• 11: The Absolute Poverty Approach


• 12: Economic Well-Being


• 13: Income Mobility


• 14: Earnings Mobility, Inequality, and Economic Growth


• Part VI: Bringing the Components Together


• 15: Private and Social Returns to Education


• 16: A Welfare Economic Analysis of Labor Market Policies


• Part VII: Concluding Thoughts


• 17: Directions for Future Research

Gary Fields is the John P. Windmuller Professor of International and Comparative Labor and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, Program Coordinator of the IZA Program on Labor and Development, and a UNU-WIDER Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow. He is the 2014 winner of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the top world-wide award in the field. He has been an Ivy League teacher and professor for more than forty years. He teaches and conducts research in labor economics and development economics, and has published more than 150 books and articles.