round), 2013 (12th round), and the first round of the Quarterly Labor Force Survey introduced in 2015–16.

Our analysis includes the following variables: gender, age, wages, educational status, marital status, individual’s primary occupational status, and employment. The survey questionnaire and reported variables changed within the period 2006–15. To ensure compatibility over time, we harmonize key variables: the “education” variable is reaggregated from 19 to 6 categories and the “informality” variable is created from multiple categories of the “principle activity status” which were harmonized overtime. Workers are then classified as informal who are either self-employed, contributing family members, and day laborers across years. We also harmonized geographic and industrial codes overtime for effective comparison.

We found some irregularities in wage earnings variables across years. Wages increase substantially between 2005 and 2013. Specifically, we noticed that workers’ wages were way higher – about 10 times – for those who report a monthly payment frequency in 2005. It was found that workers who reported a monthly frequency of payment appeared to have reported their monthly wage instead of the weekly wage, as it was reported indicated in the questionnaire. We corrected for this anomaly and present how the variables look in the final dataset through the distributional plots of logarithm of wages across years, by division across years, and by different skills across years in figure B2, B3 and B4 in annex.

According to 2015-16 labor force survey, agriculture continues to be the presiding source of employment, generating nearly 42.7 percent of total employment in Bangladesh. The importance of industry and services in Bangladesh have also grown overtime with over 20.5 percent of employment being generated by industry and 36.9 percent by services in 2015-16. Analysis of these labor force surveys highlights three acute challenges faced by the Bangladeshi labor market _—informal employment, gender differences, and spatial disparities in key labor market characteristics._ While there has been a modest 3 percentage point decline in informal employment in Bangladesh between 2005 and 2015, it continues to stand at a staggering 86 percent in 2015. A larger share of women are employed as informal workers as compared to men. In 2015, for example, 82 percent of males are employed as informal workers in contrast to 95 percent for females (Artuc et al., 2019). This gender bias is not surprising as women in Bangladesh tend to work more in subsistence agriculture and unpaid sectors which are predominantly informal in nature (Artuc et al., 2019).

Such gender discrimination can also be observed in other key labor market outcomes _—earnings and employment._ In terms of earnings, men tend to do better than women in Bangladesh in 2005 but this gap in the level of average weekly wages has narrowed down overtime. For example, average real weekly earnings for women workers were 758 _takas_ in 2005 in comparison to 1080 _takas_ for men. Overtime, this gap reduced, and average real weekly earnings stood at 1485 _takas_ for females while 1558 _takas_ for males in 2016. This pattern in average real weekly wages is consistent across most industries in Bangladesh. In addition, female labor force participation remains low in comparison to lower-middle income country average and the middle-income country average and low share of women engage in nonagricultural employment (Farole et al. 2017).

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