Search

A region known for its volatility, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has suffered severe economic and social setbacks from crises—including the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises have taken their toll on careers, wage growth, and productivity. Employment in Crisis: The Path to Better Jobs in a Post-COVID-19 Latin America provides new evidence on the effects of crises on the region’s workers and firms and suggests several policy responses that can bolster long-term and inclusive economic growth. This report has three key findings. First, crises lead to persistent employment losses and accelerate structural changes away from the formal sector. This change occurs more through reductions in the creation of formal jobs than through job destruction. Second, some workers recover from crises, while others are permanently scarred by them. Low-skilled workers can suffer up to a decade of lower earnings caused by crises, while high-skilled workers rebound fast, exacerbating the LAC region’s high level of inequality. Formal workers suffer smaller employment and wage losses in localities with higher rates of informality. And the reduced job flows caused by crises decrease welfare, but workers in localities with more job opportunities, whether formal or informal, bounce back better. Third, crises’ cleansing effects can increase efficiency and productivity, but these effects are dampened by the LAC region’s less competitive market structure. Rather than becoming more agile and productive during economic downturns, protected sectors and firms gain market share and crowd out others, trapping valuable resources. This report proposes a three-pronged mix of policies to improve the LAC region’s responses to crises: • Create a more stable macroeconomic environment to smooth the impacts of crises, including automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and short-term compensation programs; • Increase the capacity of social protection and labor programs to respond to crises and coalesce these programs into systems that complement income support with reemployment assistance and reskilling opportunities; and • Tackle structural issues, including the lack of product market competition and the spatial dimension behind poor labor market adjustment—a “good jobs and good firms” agenda.

Skills and Jobs in Brazil: An Agenda for Youth is a new report focusing on the challenge of economic engagement among the Brazilian youth. In the context of a fast aging population, Brazil’s greatest economic opportunity is to increase its labor productivity, especially that of youth. This report documents important new facts about the extent of the youth economic disengagement, while at school and at work. Today, close to half of the Brazilian youth aged 15-29 years old is not fully economically engaged, because they are neither working nor studying, are studying in schools of poor quality, or are working in informal and precarious jobs. The report shows how the youth prospects in the labor market are dimmed by policies favoring existing workers over new entrants; in addition, it shows how youth are often ill equipped to meet an increasingly challenging labor market. The report suggests new education, skills, and jobs policy changes that Brazil could prioritize moving forward, so that it can take advantage of the last wave of its demographic transition. The report discusses in particular depth policies aiming to increase learning and reduce school dropouts in upper secondary education, and labor market policies that aim to support more effective and faster youth transitions from school to work.

While adoption of new technologies is understood to enhance long-term growth and average per-capita incomes, its impact on lower-skilled workers is more complex and merits clarification. Concerns abound that advanced technologies developed in high-income countries would inexorably lead to job losses of lower-skilled, less well-off workers and exacerbate inequality. Conversely, there are countervailing concerns that policies intended to protect jobs from technology advancement would themselves stultify progress and depress productivity. This book squarely addresses both sets of concerns with new research showing that adoption of digital technologies offers a pathway to more inclusive growth by increasing adopting firms’ outputs, with the jobs-enhancing impact of technology adoption assisted by growth-enhancing policies that foster sizable output expansion. The research reported here demonstrates with economic theory and data from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico that lower-skilled workers can benefit from adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies biased towards skilled workers, and often do. The inclusive jobs outcomes arise when the effects of increased productivity and expanding output overcome the substitution of workers for technology. While the substitution effect replaces some lower-skilled workers with new technology and more highly-skilled labor, the output effect can lead to an increase in the total number of jobs for less-skilled workers. Critically, output can increase sufficiently to increase jobs across all tasks and skill types within adopting firms, including jobs for lower-skilled workers, as long as lower-skilled task content remains complementary to new technologies and related occupations are not completely automated and replaced by machines. It is this channel for inclusive growth that underlies the power of pro-competitive enabling policies and institutions—such as regulations encouraging firms to compete and policies supporting the development of skills that technology augments rather than replaces—to ensure that the positive impact of technology adoption on productivity and lower-skilled workers is realized.

This paper exploits variation in country-level indicators drawn from published data to analyze the relationship between labor regulation and the use of digital technology. The analysis shows a statistically and economically significant association between digital technology use by firms and a country's statutory minimum wage and employment protection regulations. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for level of development, economic stability, available infrastructure, and trade openness. To ensure the broadest country coverage, the paper develops new indexes of employment protection, using the World Bank's Doing Business indicators, which allow several aspects of labor market regulation—such as restrictions on hours and hiring, dismissal procedures, and severance costs--to be analyzed separately.

This paper exploits variation in country-level indicators drawn from published data to analyze the relationship between labor regulation and the use of digital technology. The analysis shows a statistically and economically significant association between digital technology use by firms and a country's statutory minimum wage and employment protection regulations. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for level of development, economic stability, available infrastructure, and trade openness. To ensure the broadest country coverage, the paper develops new indexes of employment protection, using the World Bank's Doing Business indicators, which allow several aspects of labor market regulation—such as restrictions on hours and hiring, dismissal procedures, and severance costs--to be analyzed separately.

Over the past 30 years, Vietnam has experienced significant shifts of employment away from agriculture toward manufacturing and services, away from household enterprises toward registered and regulated businesses, and away from state-owned enterprises toward private firms. This paper argues that for these processes to continue in the future, appropriately designed and implemented labor market policies need to be in place, including labor market regulations that protect workers but do not inhibit creative destruction and creation of formal sector jobs; labor market interventions that improve workers' human capital, eliminate information asymmetries, and are fiscally sustainable; and labor market institutions that give voice to workers and employers. As a part of all of these measures, Vietnam will also have to renew its efforts to integrate vulnerable groups into the labor market.

Over the past 30 years, Vietnam has experienced significant shifts of employment away from agriculture toward manufacturing and services, away from household enterprises toward registered and regulated businesses, and away from state-owned enterprises toward private firms. This paper argues that for these processes to continue in the future, appropriately designed and implemented labor market policies need to be in place, including labor market regulations that protect workers but do not inhibit creative destruction and creation of formal sector jobs; labor market interventions that improve workers' human capital, eliminate information asymmetries, and are fiscally sustainable; and labor market institutions that give voice to workers and employers. As a part of all of these measures, Vietnam will also have to renew its efforts to integrate vulnerable groups into the labor market.

The absence of or poorly functioning risk pooling mechanisms and high amounts of out-of-pocket payments for health care expose households to financial risks associated with major illnesses or accidents. The aim of this article is to analyse the extent to which out-of-pocket health spending impoverishes households in Albania. The study augments existing evidence by analysing the dynamics of such payments over different years and the weight that informal payments have in the total out-of-pocket health spending. The data used in the study come from the Albania Living Standards Measurement Survey (ALSMS) for 2002, 2005 and 2008. We measure headcount catastrophic payments using different thresholds and the decomposition of indicators by expenditure quintiles to better understand their effects. We find that out-of-pocket and informal payments have increased in real value throughout the years. Even though their catastrophic effect has gone down (due also to declining trends in absolute poverty), the effect for the poorest expenditure quintiles remains high. Out-of-pocket payments deepen the poverty headcount and also enlarge the poverty gap and again the effect is larger for the poorest quintiles. Future policy interventions should provide better protection mechanisms for the poor by providing exemption criteria or subsidized transport. They should also seek to address the widespread informal payments in the country.

This paper investigates the occupational mobility and job quality of young people in Indonesia and relates this to the concept of “scarring.” The concept of labor market scarring in this paper is the occurrence of low or zero returns to certain types of work (for example, self-employment). Scarring is expected to occur whenever an individual spends periods working in occupations in which their human capital is either stagnant or deteriorating. Fixed effects estimations using panel data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey reveal that a period in self-employment is associated with negative returns for youth (about 3 to 4 percent per year penalty), but not for older adults. In addition, there are clear patterns of persistence in self-employment over time with few individuals progressing from petty self-employment to businesses with permanent workers.

It has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide. Governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account, but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved. Thus, citizens face a social dilemma — participate in holding public servants to account at a cost in terms of time and effort or free ride, i.e. do not participate, while benefiting from the efforts of those who do. If this characterization of accountability is valid, we would expect more cooperatively inclined citizens to participate in account¬ ability institutions, while the less cooperatively inclined do not. We test the validity of this characterization by investigating the correlation between individual behavior in a simple public goods game and their participation in local and national accountability institutions in Albania. We involve a nationally representative sample of 1800 adults with children in primary school. We find significant correlations between cooperativeness and participa¬ tion in school accountability institutions and national elections, both at the individual level and the district level. These correlations are robust to the introduction of many controls in the analysis and, in the case of national elections, to the use of official election turn-out statistics in place of self-reported turn-out.

Today, Europe is a continent of low participation, low employment labor markets. Many observers would like to blame poor employment outcomes on the Euro or on austerity. But these are dangerous distractions from real problems that constitute imperatives for structural reform. There are differences across countries, but there is a “European model” of work: almost every European economy has more stringent employment protection and more generous social benefits than peers in North America, Oceania, and East Asia. This has led to low labor force participation and high unemployment, especially among young Europeans. Layered on top of these weak labor markets is the rapid onset of aging; if policies are not changed, Europe will lose about a million workers every year for the next five decades, especially in the 2030s. In short, Europe has to increase both the demand for and supply of labor. To do so, Europeans have to begin viewing competition as a necessary good, not an unnecessary evil. Restructuring unemployment and pension benefits will help to increase participation and reverse the decline of the workforce, but policies that promote competition for jobs and mobility of job-seekers are needed to increase the demand for labor. To get to full employment, Europe has to alter the employment protection laws that give too much power to those with jobs while marginalizing others to the fringes of the economy. Europeans will have to reduce and restructure the generous social benefits that simultaneously discourage young people from searching seriously for work and encourage older workers to quit work too early. Europeans will have to view mobility of workers as a prerequisite of European integration, not just a possible consequence of it. If all this is augmented by reforms to reduce public debt, encourage enterprise and innovation, and stabilize finance, Europe will have a vibrant economy, with high participation and full employment. Jel codes I38 - Government Policy; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs, J08 - Labor Economics Policies, J21 - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure, J24 - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity, J32 - Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits; Private Pensions, J42 - Monopsony; Segmented Labor Markets

There is general agreement that the existence of participatory institutions is a necessary condition for accountability, especially where top-down institutions are malfunctioning or missing. In education, the evidence on the effectiveness of participatory accountability is mixed. This paper argues that participation is a social dilemma and therefore depends, at least partly, on individuals' propensity to cooperate with others for the common good. This being the case, the mixed evidence could be owing to society-level heterogeneities in individuals' willingness and ability to overcome collective action problems. The authors investigate whether individuals' propensity to cooperate plays a role in parents' decisions to participate in both a school accountability system -- a "short route" to accountability -- and parliamentary elections -- a "long route" to accountability -- by combining survey data on 1,800 individuals' participation decisions with measures of their willingness to contribute to a public good in the context of a very simple, clearly defined laboratory experiment. They conduct a study in a new democracy, Albania, involving parents of children enrolled in primary schools. The findings confirm that, both across individuals within communities and across communities, the decision to hold teachers and school directors accountable directly through participation at the school level, and indirectly through political participation correlates with cooperativeness in a simple public goods game.

The extent to which teachers and school directors are held to account may play a central role in determining education outcomes, particularly in developing and transition countries where institutional deficiencies can distort incentives. This paper investigates the relationship between an expanded set of school inputs, including proxies for the functionality of top-down and bottom-up accountability systems, and education outputs in Albanian primary schools. The authors use data generated by an original survey of 180 nationally representative schools. The analysis shows a strong negative correlation between measures of top-down accountability and students' rates of grade repetition and failure in final examinations, and a strong positive correlation between measures of top-down accountability and students' excellence in math. Bottom-up accountability measures are correlated to various education outputs, although they tend lose statistical significance once parent characteristics, school resources and top-down accountability indicators are considered. An in-depth analysis of participatory accountability within the schools focuses on parents' willingness to hold teachers to account. Here, the survey data are combined with data from lab-type experiments conducted with parents and teachers in the schools. In general, the survey data highlight problems of limited parental involvement and lack of information about participatory accountability structures. The experiments indicate that the lack of parental participation in the school accountability system is owing to information constraints and weak institutions that allow parent class representatives to be appointed by teachers rather than elected by parents.

The absent or poorly functioning risk pooling mechanisms and high amounts of out-of-pocket payments for health care expose households to financial risks associated with major illnesses or accidents. The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which out-of-pocket health spending impoverish the households in Albania. The study augments the existing evidence by analysing the dynamics of such payments over different years and the weight that informal payments have in the total out-of-pocket health spending. The data used in this study come from Albania Living Standard Measurement Survey (ALSMS) for 2002, 2005 and 2008. We measure headcount catastrophic payments using different thresholds and the decomposition of indicators by expenditure quintiles to understand better their effects. We find that out-of-pocket and informal payments have increased in real value throughout the years. Even though their catastrophic effect has gone down (due also to declining trends in absolute poverty), the effect for the poorest expenditure quintiles remains high. Out-of-pocket payments deepen the poverty headcount and also enlarge the poverty gap and again the effect is larger for the poorest quintiles. Future policy interventions should provide better protection mechanisms for the poor by providing exemption criteria or subsidised transport and should seek to address the widespread informal payments in the country.

The absent or poorly functioning risk pooling mechanisms and high amounts of out-of-pocket payments for health care expose households to financial risks associated with major illnesses or accidents. The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which out-of-pocket health spending impoverish the households in Albania. The study augments the existing evidence by analysing the dynamics of such payments over different years and the weight that informal payments have in the total out-of-pocket health spending. The data used in this study come from Albania Living Standard Measurement Survey (ALSMS) for 2002, 2005 and 2008. We measure headcount catastrophic payments using different thresholds and the decomposition of indicators by expenditure quintiles to understand better their effects. We find that out-of-pocket and informal payments have increased in real value throughout the years. Even though their catastrophic effect has gone down (due also to declining trends in absolute poverty), the effect for the poorest expenditure quintiles remains high. Out-of-pocket payments deepen the poverty headcount and also enlarge the poverty gap and again the effect is larger for the poorest quintiles. Future policy interventions should provide better protection mechanisms for the poor by providing exemption criteria or subsidised transport and should seek to address the widespread informal payments in the country.

The World Bank Abstract: The degree to which a labor market is segmented and jobs in the formal sector of the economy are rationed is critical to the analysis of coverage of social insurance and pensions. In Chile, using unique panel data spanning the 1998-1999 contraction, I find little evidence that self-employment is the residual sector of a dualistic labor market, as is often depicted in the literature. Data on transitions between sectors show that self- employment is not a free-entry sector, and that entrepreneurs can be "pushed" out of self- employment just as others are pushed out of formal employment during economic downturns. However, employment without a contract does exhibit many of the features of the free-entry, employment safety net depicted in the dualistic literature. An annex to this paper, presents supportive evidence from static analysis of selection-corrected wage differentials, and a comment on the drawbacks of this approach.

The degree to which a labor market is segmented and jobs in the formal sector of the economy are rationed is critical to the analysis of coverage of social insurance and pensions. Using unique panel data spanning the 1998-99 contraction in Chile, the author finds little evidence that self-employment is the residual sector of a dualistic labor market, as is often depicted in the literature. Data on transitions between sectors show that self-employment is not a free-entry sector, and that entrepreneurs can be"pushed"out of self-employment just as others are pushed out of formal employment during economic downturns. But employment without a contract does exhibit many of the features of the free-entry, employment safety net depicted in the dualistic literature. An annex to this paper presents supportive evidence from static analysis of selection-corrected wage differentials and a comment on the drawbacks of this approach.

Using data collected in a survey on risk, and social insurance in Chile, the author funds that workers who entered the labor market after the pension reform of 1981, have a greater"contribution density"than those who contributed to the previous social security system. Further, the expectation of care from children, and the amount spent on their education, significantly lowers the likelihood of contribution to the pension system. Workers who have met the contributory requirements to qualify for the minimum pension guaranteed by the government, are significantly less likely to continue making contributions. The likelihood of contributions beyond the eligibility threshold being lowered further, the greater the market rental value of respondents'homes. Furthermore, individuals with a greater tolerance for risk contribute, suggesting that there are retirement security investments in Chile, that are perceived as relatively less risky than saving in the reformed pension system. The results indicate that housing could beone such investment.

Using data collected in a survey on risk and social insurance in Chile, Packard finds that workers who entered the labor market after the pension reform of 1981 have a greater "contribution density" than those who contributed to the previous social security system. Further, the expectation of care from children and the amount spent on their education significantly lowers the likelihood of contribution to the pension system. Workers who have met the contributory requirements to qualify for the minimum pension guaranteed by the government are significantly less likely to continue making contributions. The likelihood of contributions beyond the eligibility threshold being lowered further, the greater the market rental value of respondents' homes. Furthermore, individuals with a greater tolerance for risk contribute, suggesting that there are retirement security investments in Chile that are perceived as relatively less risky than saving in the reformed pension system. The results indicate that housing could be one such investment. This paper - a product of the Human Development Sector Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Region - is part of a regional study on social security reform.

There is increasing concern among policymakers that social security reforms that involve a transition to individual retirement savings accounts may exclude certain groups of workers from coverage against the risk of poverty in old age. While most public pay-as-you-go systems pool the risk of interrupted careers and periods of low earnings over the covered population, the reformed systems shift the burden of these risks to the individual. Adequate coverage under a system of individual retirement accounts depends critically on accumulating sufficient savings through regular contributions. In developing countries where opportunities for unregulated employment abound and workers can easily escape mandated social insurance, theory suggests that reforms will increase the number of contributors to social security by reducing distortions and improving incentives in the labor market. Motivated primarily by fiscal pressures stemming from the deficits of overly generous, poorly administered public pension systems, many governments are going ahead with reforms as if this theory is correct. Does a shift to individual retirement accounts improve the incentives to contribute to social security? Almost a decade after reforms to national social security systems in Latin America (two decades, in the case of Chile), existing evidence is mixed. Several studies have found that the share of the Chilean workforce covered by the national pension system has increased since individual retirement accounts were installed in 1981; others have shown that there has been no change in this share. But these studies rely on simulations or on casual observation of data on the sectoral allocation of the labor force and relate only to Chile. Sufficient time has now passed since reforms in several Latin American countries to allow more rigorous testing of the theory. The author estimates the impact of social security reform-specifically, the transition from a purely public pay-as-you-go system to one with private individual retirement accounts-on the share of the workforce that contributes to formal retirement security systems. To test the predictions of a simple model of a segmented labor market, he exploits variation in data from a panel of 18 Latin American countries, observed from 1980 to 1999. Results show that introducing individual retirement accounts has a positive incentive effect that, other things equal, increases the share of the economically active population contributing to the reformed system. But this effect occurs only gradually as employers and workers become familiar with the new set of social security institutions put in place by reform.