Journal Issue: World Bank Economic Review, Volume 37, Issue 3
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Volume
37
Number
3
Issue Date
2023-08
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
1564-698X
Journal
World Bank Economic Review
1564-698X
Journal Volume
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Articles
Minimum Wages Around Birth and Child Health
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-04-03) Majid, Muhammad Farhan; Behrman, Jere R.
This paper studies the effects of
minimum wages in Indonesia around the time of birth on child
height-for-age Z scores (HAZ) up to five years of age. Using
variations in annual fluctuations in real minimum wages in
different Indonesian provinces, it finds that children
exposed to increases in minimum wages in their birth years
have higher HAZ in the first five years of their lives. The
estimated impacts are based on difference-in-differences
models with biological-mother fixed effects and
year-of-birth fixed effects and are robust to inclusion of
multiple time-varying factors. The impacts are prominent
particularly among male children.
The Economic Impact of Deepening Trade Agreements
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-03-03) Fontagné, Lionel; Rocha, Nadia; Ruta, Michele; Santoni, Gianluca
This paper explores the economic
impacts of preferential trade agreements, conditional on
their level of ambition. It clusters 278 agreements,
encompassing 910 provisions over 18 policy areas and
estimates the trade elasticity for the different clusters.
These elasticities are used in a series of
general-equilibrium counterfactual situations for endowment
economies, revealing that deepening existing agreements (the
intensive margin of regional integration) could boost world
trade by 3.9 percent and world GDP by 0.9 percent. The
expected gains from deepening agreements within or across
regions vary depending on the initial depth of agreements
and the size of regional markets.
The Effects of Community Health Worker Visits and Primary Care Subsidies on Health Behavior and Health Outcomes for Children in Urban Mali
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-05-17) Dean, Mark; Sautmann, Anja
Subsidized primary care and community
health worker (CHW) visits are important demand-side
policies in the effort to achieve universal health care for
children aged under 5. Causal evidence on the interaction
between these policies is still sparse. This paper reports
the effects on diarrhea prevention, curative care, and
incidence as well as anthropometrics for 1,649 children from
a randomized controlled trial in Bamako that
cross-randomized CHW visits and access to free health care.
CHW visits improve prevention and subsidies increase the use
of curative care for acute illness, with some indication of
positive interaction effects. There is no evidence of moral
hazard, such as reduced preventive care among families
receiving the subsidy. Although there are no significant
improvements in malnutrition, diarrhea incidence is reduced
by over 70 percent in the group that receives both subsidies
and CHWs. Positive effects are concentrated among children
under age 2.
Hard and Soft Skills in Vocational Training
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-03-13) Barrera-Osorio, Felipe; Kugler, Adriana; Silliman, Mikko
This paper studies the effects of an
oversubscribed job-training program on skills and
labor-market outcomes using both survey and administrative
data. Overall, vocational training improves labor-market
outcomes, particularly by increasing formal employment. A
second round of randomization evaluates how applicants to
otherwise similar job-training programs are affected by the
extent that hard versus soft skills are emphasized in the
curriculum. Admission to a vocational program that
emphasizes technical relative to social skills generates
greater short-term benefits, but these relative benefits
quickly disappear, putting participants in the technical
training on equal footing with their peers from the
soft-skill training in under a year. Results from an
additional randomization suggest that offering financial
support for transportation and food increases the
effectiveness of the program. The program fails to improve
the soft skills or broader labor-market outcomes of women.
Taking Cover
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-03-03) Font-Gilabert, Paulino
Using the expansion of a large-scale
health-insurance program in Mexico and variation in local
rainfall levels, this study explores whether the
program-induced increase in healthcare coverage protected
the cognitive attainment of primary school children in the
event of adverse rainfall shocks. Results show that the
universalization of healthcare mitigated the negative effect
of atypical rainfall on test scores, particularly in more
marginalized and rural areas. An analysis of the mechanisms
at play shows a reduced incidence of sickness among
children, lower demand for their time, and higher stability
in household consumption among program-eligible families
exposed to rainfall shocks.
Domestically Flying Geese
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-03-14) Zhang, Jialiang; Zhang, Xiaobo
This paper examines the evolving
patterns of bilateral city-to-city manufacturing investment
flows from 2000 to 2015 in China, which are aggregated from
detailed firm-level investment transactions based on the
administrative business registration database. The coastal
regions were a more favorable destination for manufacturing
investment prior to 2006 despite their higher wage levels.
Since then, the trend has reversed, that is, the inland
regions have attracted a growing share of manufacturing
investment. The pattern is more pronounced for labor
intensive manufacturing industries. The wage gap between
coastal and inland cities is the main driver behind the
giant flying geese, the relocation of manufacturing firms
from coastal to inland areas.
Technology and the Task Content of Jobs Across the Development Spectrum
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-07-03) Caunedo, Julieta; Keller, Elisa; Shin, Yongseok
The tasks workers perform on the job
are informative about the direction and the impact of
technological change. We harmonize occupational task-content
measures between two worker-level surveys, which separately
cover developing and developed countries. Developing
countries use routine-cognitive tasks and routine-manual
tasks more intensively than developed countries, but less
intensively use non-routine analytical tasks and nonroutine
interpersonal tasks. This is partly because developing
countries have more workers in occupations with high routine
content and fewer workers in occupations with high
non-routine content. More importantly, a given occupation
has more routine content and less non-routine content in
developing countries than in developed countries. Since
2006, occupations with high non-routine content gained
employment relative to those with high routine content in
most countries, regardless of their income level or initial
task intensity, indicating the global reaches of the
technological change that reduces the demand for occupations
with high routine content.
Reducing Delay in Payments in Welfare Programs
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-04-29) Das, Upasak; Paul, Amartya; Sharma, Mohit
This paper assesses the impact of an
information dissemination intervention on the local-level
implementation of the rural public works program in India.
One key feature of the intervention is to provide
information to workers once their wages get credited into
their accounts. Using administrative and survey data, its
impact on delays in wage payments and days of work along
with the awareness levels of the entitlements is evaluated.
The findings indicate a substantial reduction in payment
delays and in trips made for wage withdrawal, in addition to
improvements in awareness. The decrease in the payment
delays in the treated villages persists even beyond the
intervention period. While a limited impact on work days is
observed during the intervention, a significant increase in
the post-intervention period is found. The findings
substantiated through qualitative evidence provide a
platform for an innovative and cost-effective intervention
to improve the implementation of social protection programs.