C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Did a successful fight against COVID-19 come at a cost?: Impacts of the pandemic on employment outcomes in Vietnam
(Elsevier, 2023-01)Despite its low middle-income status, Vietnam has been widely praised for its success in the fight against early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a low mortality rate of approximately 100 deaths out of a population of less than 100 million by the end of 2020. We add to the emerging literature on COVID-19 effects on the labor market for poorer countries by analyzing rich individual-level data from Vietnam’s Labor Force Surveys spanning 2015 to 2020. We find post-pandemic increases in unemployment and temporary layoff rates alongside decreases in employment quality. Monthly wages declined even as the proportion of workers receiving below-minimum wages substantially increased, contributing to sharply rising wage inequality. Our findings suggest that more resources should be allocated to protect vulnerable workers, especially as the pandemic continues to cause increasingly severe damage to the global economy. -
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Assessing Gender Gaps in Employment and Earnings in Africa: The Case of Eswatini
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-07)Persistent gender gaps characterize labor markets in many African countries. Utilizing Eswatini’s first three labor market surveys (conducted in 2007, 2010, and 2013), this paper provides first systematic evidence on the country’s gender gaps in employment and earnings. We find that women have notably lower employment rates and earnings than men, even though the global financial crisis had a less negative impact on women than it had on men. Both unadjusted and unexplained gender earnings gaps are higher in self-employment than in wage employment. Tertiary education and urban location account for a large part of the gender earnings gap and mitigate high female propensity to self-employment. Our findings suggest that policies supporting female higher education and rural-urban mobility could reduce persistent inequalities in Eswatini’s labor market outcomes as well as in other middle-income countries in southern Africa. -
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Introduction to the Special Issue “Political economic perspectives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-10-06)The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the world’s most protracted contemporary conflict and one which has gained international prominence throughout the years. As a result of the Six Days War in 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fell under Israeli control. The conflict has evolved through ebbs and flows of violence including two Palestinian uprising against Israeli control (the First and Second Intifada). These have led to tens of thousands of Palestinian and thousands of Israeli victims. There is a growing theoretical and empirical literature analyzing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this review, we discuss a selected number of studies that are most closely related to the topics covered by the articles in this special issue. -
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Spillover Effects of Tobacco Farms on the Labor Supply, Education, and Health of Children: Evidence from Malawi
(Oxford University Press, 2019-04-24)Using data from the Living Standards Measurement Study in Malawi, we examine the spillover effects of tobacco farms on children’s labor supply, education, and health. To address potential endogeneity, the share of tobacco farms in a community is instrumented by the change in tobacco buyers following termination of the intermediate buyer system. We find that, as tobacco cultivation is labor-intensive, children in communities with more tobacco growers spend more time as casual laborers and are less likely to advance to the next grade. Adverse health effects, measured by the likelihood of suffering from illnesses related to green tobacco sickness, are estimated to be larger than previously documented. This affects not only “working-age” children but also children too young to work on tobacco farms. Moreover, exposure to large-scale tobacco cultivation is estimated to reduce the height-for-age z-score of children aged 6–60 months. These findings highlight the importance of raising awareness and taking measures to protect children against green tobacco. -
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How Costly Are Labor Gender Gaps? Estimates by Age Group for the Balkans and Turkey
(Taylor and Francis, 2019-01-16)In this article we use survey data from the Balkan countries and Turkey to document the presence of gender gaps in the labor market and examine its economic consequences in terms of aggregate income per capita. We first show that the age of women in the labor force, as well as in the categories of employers and self-employed, are clearly below the corresponding figures for men. These gender inequalities display a slightly negative time trend and are present in all age groups, with the middle-age group displaying the lowest inequality in terms of labor force participation but the largest inequality in terms of employers share. Using a theoretical framework we calculate that, on average, the loss associated with these gaps is about 20% of income per capita. Taking into account that the weight of each age group in the total population is different, we find that the aggregate costs associated with each age group are quite similar on average. -
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Who Benefits from Higher Education in Low- and Middle-Income Countries?
(Taylor and Francis, 2019)In this article, we investigate how higher education contributes to the employment and earnings of individuals in labor markets, and whether social origins play a role in the financial benefits from higher education. We focus on these questions in nine low- and middle-income countries: Armenia, Bolivia, Colombia, Georgia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Macedonia, and Vietnam. We use the recent Skills Towards Employability and Productivity (STEP) surveys of urban labor force participants to examine individuals’ educational attainment, labor market participation, and earnings. Using logistic regressions, we find that individuals from disadvantaged origins are less likely to obtain a higher education degree. We find that in most of these countries, individuals who have earned a higher education degree are significantly more likely to be in the labor force and find employment, and enjoy sizable earnings premia. The findings are fairly robust with regard to the samples of individuals examined, and the methods used to measure earnings premia. Finally, we find little evidence that the earnings premia from higher education vary by social origins or the likelihood of an individual completing a degree. These results suggest that the benefits from higher education are comparable for individuals from disadvantaged and advantaged social origins. -
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Job Autonomy and Education-Skill Matches of Immigrant Workers in Germany
(Taylor and Francis, 2019)This letter examines the determinants of occupational autonomy and education-skill matches of immigrant workers in Germany. Their jobs are characterized by much lower autonomy than those of comparable natives and the immigrant penalty decreases only minimally over time. In contrast to wages, the difference between immigrants from advanced and non-advanced countries is small. But immigrants from advanced countries are much more likely to have a job matching their qualification. The probability of a match does not increase over time for highly educated immigrants, but does for others. Highly educated immigrant women have an additional disadvantage. In some industries low autonomy and skill downgrading of immigrant workers are particularly common. -
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Software Adoption, Employment Composition and the Skill Content of Occupations in Chilean Firms
(Taylor and Francis, 2018-12-10)We contribute to the technology, skills, and jobs debate by exploiting a novel data set for Chilean firms between 2007 and 2013, with information on the firms’ adoption of complex software used in client management, production, or administration and business software packages. Instrumental variables estimates show that, in the medium-run, adoption of this complex software reallocates employment away from professional and technical workers, toward administrative and unskilled workers (production and services). Adoption also increases the use of routine and manual tasks and reduces that of abstract tasks within firms. The contrast between ours and previous findings shows that labor market impacts of technology adoption hinge on the type of technology and its complementarity with the skills content of occupations. -
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Book Review of Managing Globalization in the Asian Century: Essays in Honour of Prema-Chandra Athukorala
(Taylor and Francis, 2017)Asia is a region of economic miracles, and this festschrift for the esteemed development economist Prema-Chandra Athukorala highlights a major driver of Asia’s success: globalization. Economic progress in Asia cannot be separated from globalization’s role in industrializing the region’s agrarian economies. Most countries in Asia have, to varying degrees, embraced globalization by opening up to foreign direct investment (to stimulate markets and to transfer know-how) and facilitating the growth of export-oriented industries. -
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Workforce Reduction, Subjective Job Insecurity, and Mental Health
(Elsevier, 2017-01)We examine the link between workforce reduction, subjective job insecurity, and mental health using individual level panel data for private-sector employees in Germany. We first estimate the effect of firm-level workforce reductions on mental health, finding a strong, negative, and statistically significant relationship. We then extensively examine the role of subjective job insecurity as mediating variable and its importance relative to other possible channels for the effect of workforce reduction on mental health. Eventually, as an extension to our analysis, we use life satisfaction as alternative outcome variable.