A half-day seminar that presented recent research on employment and development, including the launch of two new Development Progress case studies on employment in Sri Lanka and Uganda. The seminar aimed to help focus policy discussions on how to better link these two areas with policies that promote economic transformation. New research was presented from the Development Progress project, carried out in collaboration with the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), and from ODI's Private Sector & Markets programme.
Since the 1990s Uganda, a small, landlocked country, has experienced the initial phases of economic transformation, accompanied by important employment progress. The country has seen a significant expansion in the share of wage employment, particularly during the 2000s, with private, non-agricultural wage employment experiencing one of the fastest growth rates in Africa. Overall labour productivity has more than doubled from 1990 to 2010. This study, written in collaboration with ECDPM, aims to explain this progress.