Person:
Silva, Joana
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Development Economics,
Labor Economics,
Social Protection,
Human Development,
International Trade
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Latin America and Caribbean
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Joana Silva is a Senior Economist at the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean. Since joining the World Bank in 2007 as a Young Professional, Joana published several books and articles on a broad set of issues related to economic development, including labor economics, education/skills, social safety nets, poverty, inequality, political economy of economic reforms, firm dynamics and international trade. Her research has been published in professional journals such as the Journal of International Economics, Economics Letters, Review of World Economics and IZA Journal of Labor Policy. Book titles authored or coauthored by Joana include “Sustaining Employment and Wage Gains in Brazil: a Skills and Jobs Agenda”, “Inclusion and Resilience: The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa” and “Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa”. While at the Bank she authored thematic Flagship Reports (e.g. as Task Team Leader for the 2013 MENA Development Report, the Brazil Skills & Jobs report), managed cross-sectorial lending projects and advisory activities (e.g. Task Team Leader for innovative labor and social protection projects), and contributed to a range of analytical studies on design and evaluation of social welfare systems, labor markets, political economy, international integration and investment climate. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Nottingham. Prior to joining the World Bank, she also worked for the Globalization and Economic Policy Research Center at the University of Nottingham and the Inter-American Development Bank. She is fluent in Portuguese, French, English, and Spanish.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 20
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Publication
Inclusion and Resilience : The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013-05)The report aims to meet two broad objectives: (a) enhance knowledge about the current state of existing social safety nets (SSNs) and assess their effectiveness in responding to new and emerging challenges to the poor and vulnerable in the region by bringing together new evidence, data, and country-specific analysis; and (b) open up and inform a debate on feasible policy options to make SSNs in the Middle East and North Africa more effective and innovative. The first chapter, 'a framework for SSN reform,' describes and illustrates the reasons for the region's growing need for SSN reform and establishes the framework for renewed SSNs. It identifies key goals for SSNs (promoting social inclusion, livelihood, and resilience) and illustrates how these goals have been achieved in some parts of the region and elsewhere. The second chapter, 'key challenges that call for renewed SSNs,' analyzes the challenges facing the region's poor and vulnerable households, which SSNs could focus on as a priority. Two large groups are at higher-than-average poverty risk: children and those who live in rural or lagging areas. The third chapter, 'the current state of SSNs in the Middle East and North Africa,' analyzes SSN spending and assesses different aspects of the SSN systems' performance. The fourth chapter, 'the political economy of SSN reforms in the Middle East and North Africa: what do citizens want?' presents new evidence on citizens' preferences concerning redistribution and SSN design, using newly collected data. It also discusses how political economy considerations could be taken into account in designing renewed SSNs in the region. The fifth chapter, 'the way forward: how to make safety nets in the Middle East and North Africa more effective and innovative,' proposes an agenda for reform and the path for moving forward, using global experience and the evidence presented in the preceding chapters. -
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Inclusion and Resilience : The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in MENA
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-09)The Arab Spring and subsequent transitions provide opportunities for better governance, economies free of cronyism and more inclusive models of growth. Social Safety Nets (SSN) will be a key component of building more inclusive economies and societies. And here too there are grounds for optimism. Most SSN programs around the world were introduced during transition periods (post-Soviet independence, Indonesia's decentralization, and regime change in Brazil and Portugal), and have remained in place since. Effective SSNs can break the cycle of intergenerational poverty by helping families to keep children healthy and in school. SSNs and increased social services can also deal with spatial pockets of poverty in slums and rural areas by promoting the demand for social services and by building community assets. Most SSNs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA SSNs) finance energy subsidies, crowding out more effective intervention. In addition to surveys, this study conducted a behavioral experiment among a representative sample of the Jordanian middle class, collecting information on preferences for redistribution to the poor using valuable trade-offs. -
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Networks, Firms, and Trade
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2012-11)Fixed costs associated with learning about demand and setting up distribution networks are expected to be lower when there are more potential contacts in the destination market, suggesting a greater probability of market entry and larger export revenues. The authors match historically-determined emigration stocks with detailed firm-level data from Portugal to examine the effect of migrant networks on these export outcomes. They find that larger stocks of emigrants in a given destination increase export participation and intensity. In addition, they show that the former of these effects tends to be more pronounced among firms that are more likely to have close ties with the emigrants. These results are consistent with a multiple-destination version of the Melitz (2003) model featuring market-specific entry costs and idiosyncratic firm-destination demand shocks. -
Publication
Striving for Better Jobs : The Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-08-26)Economic growth has been sustained for many years pre-crisis in the region, but this has not resulted in the creation of an adequate number of jobs and has succeeded, at best, in generating low-quality, informal jobs. The report addresses one margin of exclusion: informal employment and the vulnerabilities and lack of opportunities associated with it. The report analyzes the constraints that prevent informal workers from becoming formal and discusses policy options to effectively address these constraints. This report looks at informality through a human development angle and focuses particularly on informal employment. Informality is a complex phenomenon, comprising unpaid workers and workers without social security or health insurance coverage, small or micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and large registered firms that may partially evade corporate taxes and social security contributions. The first section provides a detailed profile of informal workers in the region. The second section describes the characteristics of informality in micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and in larger firms that do not fully comply with social security contribution requirements and tax obligations. The third section presents informality and the firm. The fourth section focuses on informality: choice or exclusion? The fifth section discusses policy options for effectively expanding coverage of health insurance and pension systems and promoting the creation of better quality jobs. -
Publication
Export Destinations and Input Prices
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)This paper examines the extent to which the destination of exports matters for the input prices paid by firms, using detailed customs and firm-product-level data from Portugal. The authors use exchange rate movements as a source of variation in export destinations and find that exporting to richer countries leads firms to charge more for outputs and pay higher prices for inputs, other things equal. The results are supportive of the hypothesis that an exogenous increase in average destination income leads firms to raise the average quality of goods they produce and to purchase higher-quality inputs. -
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Trade Liberalisation and Human Capital Adjustment
( 2010)This paper highlights the way in which workers of different ages and abilities are affected by anticipated and unanticipated trade liberalisations. A two-factor (skilled and unskilled labour), two-sector Heckscher-Ohlin trade model is supplemented with an education sector which uses skilled labour and time to convert unskilled workers into skilled workers. A skilled worker's income depends on her ability, but all unskilled workers have the same income. Trade liberalisation in a relatively skilled labour abundant country increases the relative skilled wage and induces skill upgrading by the existing workforce, with younger and more able unskilled workers most likely to upgrade. But not all upgraders are better off as a result of the liberalisation. The older and less able upgraders are likely to lose. For an anticipated liberalisation we show that the preferred upgrading strategies depend on a worker's ability and that much of the upgrading will take place before the liberalisation. Hence some workers who would have upgraded had they anticipated the liberalisation will not if it is unanticipated, and adjustment assistance that applies only to post-liberalisation upgraders will fail to compensate some losers and distort the upgrading decisions of others. -
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The Quality of a Firm's Exports: Where You Export to Matters
( 2010)What drives export quality? Using Portuguese firm-level data on exports by product and destination market, we find that f.o.b. unit values increase systematically with distance, and tend to be higher in shipments to richer nations. These relationships reflect not only the sorting of firms across markets, but also the within-firm variation of unit values across destinations. Within product categories, higher-productivity firms tend to ship greater quantities at higher prices to a given market, consistent with higher quality. In addition, firm productivity tends to magnify the positive effect of distance on within-product unit values, suggesting that high-productivity, high-quality firms are more able to serve difficult markets. -
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Trust in Government and Support for Redistribution
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05)In many countries safety nets consist predominantly of universal subsidies on food and fuel. A key question for policy makers willing to shift to targeted safety nets is under what conditions middle-class citizens would be supportive of redistributive programs. Results from a behavioral experiment based on a nationally representative sample in Jordan reveal that increasing transparency in benefit delivery makes middle-class citizens (particularly among the youth and low-trust individuals) more willing to forgo their own welfare to benefit the poor. Moreover, increasing transparency enhances the relative support for cash-based safety nets, which have greater impact on poverty compared with in-kind transfers, but may be perceived as more prone to elite capture. -
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Exports and Job Training
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05)This paper examines whether export participation matters for job training. The paper draws on longitudinal worker-firm data for Brazilian manufacturing, linked with detailed records on training activity from the main provider. The analysis uses industry-specific exchange rate movements to generate exogenous variation in export status at the firm-level. The findings indicate that export participation tends to increase the share of workers who receive technical upgrading. The results also reveal that technical upgrading has positive returns to trainees within exporting firms. These findings support the hypothesis that exporting requires skill upgrading, and suggest that this is partially achieved by training firms' existing workforce. -
Publication
Wage Inequality in Latin America: Understanding the Past to Prepare for the Future
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018)What caused the decline in wage inequality of the 2000s in Latin America? Looking to the future, will the current economic slowdown be regressive? Wage Inequality in Latin America: Understanding the Past to Prepare for the Future addresses these two questions by reviewing relevant literature and providing new evidence on what we know from the conceptual, empirical, and policy perspectives. The answer to the first question can be broken down into several parts, although the bottom line is that the changes in wage inequality resulted from a combination of three forces: (a) education expansion and its effect on falling returns to skill (the supply-side story); (b) shifts in aggregate domestic demand; and (c) exchange rate appreciation from the commodity boom and the associated shift to the nontradable sector that changed interfirm wage differences. Other forces had a non-negligible but secondary role in some countries, while they were not present in others. These include the rapid increase of the minimum wage and a rapid trend toward formalization of employment, which played a supporting role but only during the boom. Understanding the forces behind recent trends also helps to shed light on the second question. The analysis in this volume suggests that the economic slowdown is putting the brakes on the reduction of inequality in Latin America and will likely continue to do so—but it might not actually reverse the region’s movement toward less wage inequality.