03. Journals

2,963 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210

These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

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Factors Associated with Educational and Career Aspirations of Young Women and Girls in Sierra Leone

(Taylor and Francis, 2021-09-05) Allmang, Skye ; Rozhenkova, Veronika ; Khakshi, James Ward ; Raza, Wameq ; Heymann, Jody

Empirical data on the aspirations of young women and girls in post-conflict settings are scarce. This article analyses the factors associated with the educational and career aspirations of 2,473 young women and girls in Sierra Leone. Findings indicated that over three-quarters of our sample aspired to continue their studies up to the university level, and two-thirds aspired to obtain a formal sector job requiring an education. These findings are important for discussions of aid which can accelerate economic advances and opportunities within advanced economies for both women and men.
Mentoring Migrants for Labor Market Integration: Policy Insights from a Survey of Mentoring Theory and Practice

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-06-01) Bagnoli, Lisa ; Estache, Antonio

The vast majority of international migrants from developing countries are of working age. And yet, their integration in the formal local labor market of their host countries continues to be a challenge. This paper reviews the scope of mentoring programs as a more systematic policy instrument to facilitate the integration of migrants into the labor market. It synthesizes the multidisciplinary academic research on mentoring. The review highlights the diversity of outcomes indicators and the relevance of context in the choice of mentoring program design. Determinants of success include the personal characteristics of the mentee and of the mentor and the efforts to match them but also the efforts made to account for the human, institutional, financial, and political context in the overall design of programs. Despite the significant progress achieved in understanding the determinants of mentoring effectiveness, the survey shows that there are still many sources of uncertainty on the optimal design of mentoring programs. This justifies a research agenda in a field with growing and significant political and social prominence of direct relevance to both developed and developing countries.
Persistent Misallocation and the Returns to Education in Mexico

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06) Levy, Santiago ; López-Calva, Luis F.

Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime, and substantial progress in education. Yet average workers’ earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings distribution and lowering the returns to education. This paper argues that distortions that misallocate resources toward less-productive firms explain these phenomena, because these firms are less intensive in well-educated workers compared with more-productive ones. It shows that while the relative supply of workers with more years of schooling has increased, misallocation of resources toward less-productive firms has persisted. These two trends have generated a widening mismatch between the supply of, and the demand for, educated workers. The paper breaks down worker earnings into observable and unobservable firm and individual worker characteristics, and computes a counterfactual earnings distribution in the absence of misallocation. The main finding is that in the absence of misallocation average earnings would be higher, and that earnings differentials across schooling levels would widen, raising the returns to education. A no-misallocation path is constructed for the wage premium. Depending on parameter values, this path is found to be rising or constant, in contrast to the observed downward path. The paper concludes arguing that the persistence of misallocation impedes Mexico from taking full advantage of its investments in the education of its workforce.
Twenty Years of Wage Inequality in Latin America

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-12-06) Messina, Julian ; Silva, Joana

This article documents an inverse U-shape in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since 1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995 and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, the 90/10 log hourly earnings ratio decreased by 26 percent. The decline since 2002 was characterized by rising wages across the board, but especially at the bottom of the wage distribution in each country. Triggered by a rapid expansion of educational attainment, the wages of college and high school graduates fell relative to the wages of workers with only primary education. The premium for labor market experience also fell significantly. However, the compression of wages was not entirely driven by changes in the wage structure across skill groups. Two-thirds of the decline in the variance of wages took place within skill groups. Changes in the sectoral, occupational, and formal/informal composition of jobs matter for the process of reduction in inequality, but they do not fully account for the fall in within-skill variance. Evidence based on longitudinal matched employer-employee administrative data suggests that an important driver was falling wage dispersion across firms.
What Explains Uneven Female Labor Force Participation Levels and Trends in Developing Countries?

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-08) Klasen, Stephan

Rapid fertility decline, a strong expansion of female education, and favorable economic conditions should have promoted female labor force participation in developing countries. Yet trends in female labor force participation rates (FLFP) have been quite heterogeneous, rising strongly in Latin America and stagnating in many other regions, while improvements were modest in the Middle East and female participation even fell in South Asia. These trends are inconsistent with secular theories such as the feminization U hypothesis but point to an interplay of initial conditions, economic structure, structural change, and persistent gender norms and values. We find that differences in levels are heavily affected by historical differences in economic structure that circumscribe women's economic opportunities still today. Shocks can bring about drastic changes, with the experience of socialism being the most important shock to women's labor force participation. Trends are heavily affected by how much women's labor force participation depends on their household's economic conditions, how jobs deemed appropriate for more educated women are growing relative to the supply of more educated women, whether growth strategies are promoting female employment, and to what extent women are able to break down occupational barriers within the sectors where women predominantly work.
How Well Do Catholic and Other Faith-Based Schools Serve the Poor? A Study with Special Reference to Africa: Part I -- Schooling

(Taylor and Francis, 2019-02-22) Wodon, Quentin

Serving the poor is a prime component of the mission of Catholic and many other faith-based schools. Do the schools succeed in doing so? This paper and a companion paper focusing on learning aim to answer this question. In this paper, the focus is on schooling or enrolment in school. The paper considers first global and regional data on the number of students in Catholic preschools and nurseries, primary schools, and secondary schools. The data suggest that Catholic schools are located proportionately more in low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. However, having schools in low income countries does not guarantee that they serve disadvantaged children. Relying on household survey data from Africa, the second part of the analysis suggests that while Catholic and other faith-based schools reach many children in poverty, they often serve children from better off households proportionately more. The last part of the paper considers the constraints faced by Catholic and other faith-based schools in reaching the poor. Some constraints are shared with other types of schools, but others are peculiar to Catholic and faith-based schools, especially in terms of the funding from households that they need to operate given no or only limited state support.
The World Bank Human Capital Index: A Guide

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-02) Kraay, Aart

This paper provides a guide to the new World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI), situating its methodology in the context of the development accounting literature. The HCI combines indicators of health and education into a measure of the human capital that a child born today can expect to achieve by her 18th birthday, given the risks of poor education and health that prevail in the country where she lives. The HCI is measured in units of productivity relative to a benchmark of complete education and full health, and ranges from 0 to 1. A value of x on the HCI indicates that a child born today can expect to be only x×100 percent as productive as a future worker as she would be if she enjoyed complete education and full health.
Job Autonomy and Education-Skill Matches of Immigrant Workers in Germany

(Taylor and Francis, 2019) Beyer, Robert C.M.

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.
Does Improved Local Supply of Schooling Enhance Intergenerational Mobility in Education? Evidence from Jordan

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2018-10) Assaad, Ragui ; Saleh, Mohamed

The impact of the growth of the local supply of public schools in the post-Colonial period on intergenerational mobility in education is a first-order question in the Arab World. This question is examined in Jordan using a unique dataset that links individual data on own schooling and parents’ schooling for adults, from a household survey, with the supply of schools in the subdistrict of birth at the time the individual was of age to enroll, from a school census. The identification strategy exploits the variation in the supply of basic and secondary public schools across cohorts and subdistricts of birth in Jordan, controlling for year and subdistrict-of-birth fixed effects and interactions of governorate and year-of-birth fixed effects. The findings show that the local availability of basic public schools does, in fact, increase intergenerational mobility in education. For instance, a one standard deviation increase in the supply of basic public schools per 1,000 people reduces the father-son and mother-son associations of schooling by 18–20 percent and the father-daughter and mother-daughter associations by 33–44 percent. However, an increase in the local supply of secondary public schools does not seem to have an effect on the intergenerational mobility in education.
Shoeing the Children: The Impact of the TOMS Shoe Donation Program in Rural El Salvador

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2018-10) Wydick, Bruce ; Katz, Elizabeth ; Calvo, Flor ; Gutierrez, Felipe ; Janet, Brendan

We carry out a cluster-randomized trial among 1,578 children from 979 households in rural El Salvador to test the impacts of TOMS shoe donations on children’s time allocation, school attendance, health, self-esteem, and aid dependency. Results indicate high levels of usage and approval of the shoes by children in the treatment group, and time diaries show modest evidence that the donated shoes allocated children’s time toward outdoor activities.Difference-in-difference and ANCOVA estimates find generally insignificant impacts on overall health, foot health, and self-esteem but small positive impacts on school attendance for boys. Children receiving the shoes were significantly more likely to state that outsiders should provide for the needs of their family. Thus, in a context where most children already own at least one pair of shoes, the overall impact of the shoe donation program appears to be negligible, illustrating the importance of more careful targeting of in-kind donation programs.