Structural transformation stalled: counting the labour market costs of macroeconomic distress in Mozambique

Sam Jones

No wp-2026-98, WIDER Working Paper Series from World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER)

Abstract: For two decades Mozambique was a development success story. But the 2016 hidden-debts crisis, compounded by conflict, cyclones, and the pandemic, brought that to an end. This paper shows these crises amounted to more than just slower growth: movement of workers into higher-productivity activities stalled. Using five harmonized household surveys spanning 1996-2023 and a new extension of the within-between decomposition that resolves the reallocation term into distribution, scale, and wage-cost margins, I trace where in the economy the stall arose.

Keywords: Structural transformation; Decomposition; Economic crisis; Mozambique; Labour market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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