ABSTRACT
This chapter will review the principal channels through which institutional interventions have affected employment and wages in the formal wage sector in Africa, with particular attention to the countries discussed in this book. In recent African economic history, there have been four major areas of institutional influence on the labor market. These are:
• Minimum wage legislation • Public sector employment • Job security legislation and other methods of protecting employment • Unions and their role in the determination of wages and employment
We shall assess the importance of each of these factors in an historical context. In this chapter and particularly sections 3 and 4 we refer to the data generated by the RPED Survey of the World Bank. This is a sample survey of manufacturing enterprises and their workers in a number of African countries, carried out in three years of the mid-nineties. A discussion of the nature of the surveys and the methodology employed is to be found in the Appendix.
