DPRU Google Hangout on Labour Regulations and Enforcement; August 22, 14 CET / SAST

Moderator: Professor Haroon Bhorat (DPRU)

Haroon Bhorat is Director of the Development Policy Research Unit, and Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town. He’s co-authored two books and published over 150 academic journal articles, book chapters and working papers, covering labour economics, poverty and income distribution. He recently co-edited The Oxford Companion to the Economics of South Africa. He is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, an IZA Research Fellow (Institute for the Study of Labour), a member of the World Bank’s Commission on Global Poverty, and a member of the UN-WHO’s High Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth. He holds a highly prestigious National Research Chair, is an Advisor on the South African Parliament’s High Level Panel on Acceleration of Change and Transformation, and has served as economic advisor to former Presidents, and former South African Ministers of Finance, also serving on the Presidential Economic Advisory Panel.

Tim Gindling (University of Maryland)
Tim Gindling is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and a Research Fellow at IZA. He conducts research on the factors influencing the distribution of wages, income, and work in Latin America and East Asia. A focus of his recent research has been the study of compliance with legal minimum wage regulations in Central America and China.

Piotr Lewandowski (IBS)

Piotr Lewandowski is one of the founders and the President of the Board at the Institute for Structural Research (IBS), a research institute based in Warsaw, Poland. His research work is focused on labour market economics (in particular labour market regulations, non-standard forms of work and minimum wage, as well as the influence of technology on employment), pensions and social welfare, economic analysis of post-transformation countries, as well as macro- and microeconomic modelling of the effects of climate and energy policy on society and employment. In the past he was employed at the Warsaw School of Economics’ Department of Economics. He has also collaborated with UNDP Poland and the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy in Poland.

Lucas Ronconi (Centro de Investigación y Acción Social, CONICET)

Lucas Ronconi is an Economist and Ph.D. in Public Policy scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a Fulbright Scholar and received a Global Development Network award for research on development. His research areas are labor economics, applied econometrics and social policies. He has published in World Development, Economics Letters, Industrial Relations, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Urban Studies, Do Bois Review, Studies in International Comparative Development, and Health Economics.

Uma Rani (Research Department, ILO)

Uma Rani has been a Senior Economist at the ILO’s Research Department since 2008. Prior to joining the ILO she worked as an Associate Professor at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research, in Ahmedabad, India. She has also held Visiting Fellow positions at the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan; ETH-NADEL, Zürich; and Institut de Recherche pour le Development, Paris, to undertake research on informal employment, precarious and non-standard forms of work. Her main research interests lie in development economics, the informal sector, minimum wages, poverty, inequality, social policies and gender. She is author and co-author of numerous articles in refereed journals and books. Two recent books she has co-authored are “Social Income and Insecurity: A Study in Gujarat” (Routledge, 2010) and “Flexibility of Labour in Globalizing India: The Challenge of Skills and Technology” (Tulika Books, 2008).