Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

Pakistan hosts the 9th largest labour force in the world, with 73% of its workers employed in the informal economy. A majority of…

The practice of oral history is the documentation of people’s words, memories and experiences. This research methodology engages historical frameworks and relies on interviewing, transcribing…

About 60 percent of the world’s labour force works in the informal sector, typically outside the net of formal institutionalised relationships between workers, states and companies. This means that informal workers are often excluded from state-led social protection programmes and the various formal...

In 1992, Larry Summers in his lecture at the Annual Pakistan Society of Development Economics titled, “Investing in all the people”, presented a compelling argument in favor of girls’ education for development. The main academic debates...

This blog is based on the paper “Who can work and study from home in Pakistan: Evidence from a 2018–19 nationwide household survey” by Syed M. Hasan (LUMS), Attique ur Rehman (LUMS) and Wendong Zhang (Iowa State University) and published in World Development

There remains an overwhelming need to reduce the gender gap in labor force participation rates in Pakistan. As of 2021, women’s participation rates remain at around 22 pc with the country recording the slowest progress in closing the gender gap in the Economic Participation...

Growth in total factor productivity (TFP) is usually measured as growth in aggregate output minus growth in aggregate input. Previous studies have...

Why aren’t much higher levels of women entering the labour market given the levels of aspiration in the population? Addressing this puzzle is important because...