Productivity growth has been slowing down globally in recent years in light of heightened economic crises and geopolitical tensions. This book puts the issue of low productivity growth in small countries under a microscope, exploring Jamaica’s productivity challenges in its quest to achieve its United Nation Sustainable Developmental Goals. Overall, this book provides useful examples of handicaps that small countries face and proposes different approaches in finding plausible solutions to their overarching productivity challenges. This study provides useful lessons to other countries, as well, which would like to transition from developing to developed and to better the lives of their citizens.

The surge in remote and hybrid work arrangements has sparked a paradigm shift in the employment ecosystem. While remote work offers employees the coveted flexibility and freedom from daily commutes, it also introduces challenges such as isolation, reduced visibility, and questions about productivity. Impact of Teleworking and Remote Work on Business: Productivity, Retention, Advancement, and Bottom Line delves into the multifaceted impact of teleworking on businesses, exploring how different organizations grapple with these challenges, drawing on the experiences of industry giants like Google and IBM. It carefully dissects the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking, addressing distractions, cybersecurity concerns, and the polarized nature of remote work across global and skill dimensions. The book presents an exploration of solutions tailored for diverse stakeholders. From strategies to enhance employee productivity and maintain confidentiality to fostering human connections and tackling the challenges faced by new hires, each chapter offers actionable insights. Employers, employees, and management teams will find guidance on creating a collaborative and innovative remote work culture, mitigating distractions, and striking a balance between work and personal life. The suggested topics span the gamut of remote work intricacies, from the relationship between remote work and job satisfaction to strategies for maintaining connections between managers and remote employees. With small, medium, and large companies, government agencies, and universities as the target audience, the book serves as a strategic guide for entities seeking to harness the potential of remote work while mitigating its challenges.

A large percentage of workers and firms operate in the informal economy, outside the line of sight of governments in emerging market and developing economies. This may hold back the recovery in these economies from the deep recessions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic--unless governments adopt a broad set of policies to address the challenges of widespread informality. This study is the first comprehensive analysis of the extent of informality and its implications for a durable economic recovery and for long-term development. It finds that pervasive informality is associated with significantly weaker economic outcomes--including lower government resources to combat recessions, lower per capita incomes, greater poverty, less financial development, and weaker investment and productivity.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is an economically diverse region. Despite undertaking economic reforms in many countries, and having considerable success in avoiding crises and achieving macroeconomic stability, the region’s economic performance in the past 30 years has been below potential. This paper takes stock of the region’s relatively weak performance, explores the reasons for this out come, and proposes an agenda for urgent reforms.

This report documents the importance of the rural sector and agriculture in least developed countries (LDCs), through employment generation and economic activity. The discussion is placed in the perspective of the post-2015 development agenda, in which rural economic transformation will be vital for poverty eradication. It presents evidence on agricultural productivity dynamics in LDCs, discussing the importance of agricultural productivity for human development in rural areas, and analyzing the key elements driving agricultural productivity growth in these countries. It examines the synergies and complementarities between agricultural productivity growth and rural economic diversification. It discusses policies which need to be put in place.

This book reports on cutting-edge theories and methods for analyzing complex systems, such as transportation and communication networks and discusses multi-disciplinary approaches to dependability problems encountered when dealing with complex systems in practice. The book presents the most noteworthy methods and results discussed at the International Conference on Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication (RelStat), which took place in Riga, Latvia on October 18 – 21, 2017. It spans a broad spectrum of topics, from mathematical models and design methodologies, to software engineering and data security issues, as well as practical problems in technical systems, such as transportation, and telecommunications.

Manufacturing-led development has provided the traditional model for creating jobs and prosperity. But in the past three decades the conventional pattern of structural transformation has changed, with the services sector growing faster than the manufacturing sector. This raises critical questions about the ability of developing economies to close productivity gaps with advanced economies and to create good jobs for more people. At Your Service? The Promise of Services-Led Development (www.worldbank.org/services-led-development) assesses the scope of a services-driven development model and policy directions that can maximize the model’s potential.