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Cunningham, Wendy

Global Practice on Social Protection and Labor
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Labor economics, Development economics, Human development theory
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Global Practice on Social Protection and Labor
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Last updated: February 20, 2024
Biography
Wendy Cunningham, a U.S. national, is a Lead Economist in the World Bank’s Social Protection and Labor Practice. In this role, she is responsible for working with client countries to develop and implement policies and programs to improve labor market access and success, particularly for more vulnerable populations. Her research focuses on measurement and programming around skills-for-the labor market, with a particular focus on socio-emotional skills. She has a strong publications record on labor markets, informal employment, gender, and youth development. Previously, she had been the World Bank’s Program Leader for Human Development and Poverty in Mexico and Colombia, and the Coordinator for the World Bank’s program on Child and Youth Development. She holds a Ph.D. in Labor Economics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Citations 54 Scopus

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    The Demand for Digital and Complementary Skills in Southeast Asia
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05-31) Cunningham, Wendy; Moroz, Harry; Muller, Noël
    As the economies of Southeast Asia continue adopting digital technologies, policy makers increasingly ask how to prepare the workforce for emerging labor demands. However, little is known about the skills that workers need to adapt to these changes. Skills profiles in low- and middle-income countries are typically derived from data collected in the United States, which is known to inaccurately reflect their occupational skills. This paper uses online job postings data from Malaysia to identify the digital, cognitive, and socioemotional skills required for digital and non-digital occupations. The skills profiles for each occupation are then merged with labor force survey data from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam to sketch skills profiles of the workforces in these countries. Using descriptive statistics and linear probability model regressions, the paper finds evidence that highly digital occupations require not only digital skills, but also cognitive and socioemotional skills. Similarly, virtually all occupations, regardless of the digital intensity of the job, require some basic or intermediate digital skills. Pairwise correlations and a factor analysis confirm the complementarity between digital skills and different subsets of cognitive and socioemotional skills. The data also confirm that, even with the excitement about the digital revolution, the bulk of employment in Southeast Asia is in low- (around two-thirds) or medium-digital (around one-third) occupations. Only between 1 and 5 percent of jobs are highly digital in the four countries studied. These findings suggest that as education and training systems adapt to teach basic digital skills, they will need to continue to foster cognitive and socioemotional skills.
  • Publication
    Gender Analysis of the Cambodian Labor Market
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07-06) Gavalyugova, Dimitria; Cunningham, Wendy
    This paper has six sections. The authors begin with an overview of the gender-specific trends in labor force participation, industry employment shares, overall shifts in wage employment, and gender gaps in wages and educational attainment in Cambodia. The authors continue with an industry-specific look at wage employment trends, which confirms that, while there are a few emerging higher-skilled sectors such as financial services, the manufacturing sector (and the garment sector in particular) still dominates and continues to grow in importance for women’s wage work. The authors then shed light on the vertical occupational segregation patterns within industry and show that even if women are not underrepresented in manager positions in the dominant manufacturing (garment) sector, this type of positions represent less than one percent of all manufacturing jobs. In fact, at present the only sector providing prospects for career growth beyond low-skilled work is the services industry, where women are underrepresented as managers, but overrepresented as professionals and clerical workers. Moving on to wages, we test whether the gender wage gap and the factors contributing to it differ by industry. Occupational levels and education seem to play a role in explaining only a fraction of the wage gaps in construction and agriculture respectively, while the gender gap in trade remains completely unexplained by observable characteristics. What is of even greater interest is the fact that there is no gender wage gap in manufacturing, while the gap in services appears only after controlling for education and occupational level. Importantly, in all sectors other than manufacturing, women with identical characteristics and similar occupations still earn significantly less than men. The authors also explore the extent to which motherhood explains women’s labor force experiences. The presence of young children in the household do not seem to explain the gap in wages. Nevertheless, we show that they significantly increase the probability that a woman will transition to non-wage employment, likely due to the need to combine household duties, childcare and work. Inspired by literature in similar country contexts, authors then demonstrate that the sizeable expansion of job opportunities for women in the garment sector has likely had a disproportionately negative influence on Cambodian girls’ retention beyond primary schooling (compared to boys), thus limiting their employment and wage opportunities. Because of the continued role that non-wage employment plays in women’s occupational paths, authors finish the paper with an overview of the trends in the sector, with a focus on non-farm enterprises, which appear to be slowly taking over agriculture.
  • Publication
    Delivering Digital G2P Payments to Urban Informal Populations: Lessons and Future Policy Implications from COVID-19 Responses
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-10-03) Ubah, Ubah Thomas; Mukherjee, Anit; Webster, Brian; Cunningham, Wendy; Marin, Georgina
    The COVID-19 response in many Sub-Saharan African countries included the rapid deployment of social protection programs leveraging digital systems to counteract the income losses that were disproportionately experienced by urban informal populations. Using data from three in-depth country case studies, this paper finds that these digital government-to-person (G2P) payments contributed to countries reaching beneficiaries quickly and safely and that G2P payments may be particularly viable in urban, as compared to rural, areas due to greater access to digital and financial infrastructure, creative use of big data, and population density that allows for mass communication. However, there are still pockets of exclusion in urban areas emerging from incomplete digital access, limited financial inclusion, underdeveloped financial ecosystems, and high population mobility. It is particularly challenging to identify, communicate with, assess, and deliver G2P services to informal workers in urban areas due to their non-registration status, variable income flows, the blending of the home and household enterprises into a single entity, and the governments’ limited experience in identifying eligible beneficiaries within this segment. While adopting a digital G2P architecture provides a promising avenue to strengthen the safety nets for this segment in the region, exclusion challenges remain. Given the ubiquity of urban informality in the region, countries will need to work to include the urban informal in foundational digital systems, such as national IDs and social registries, adopt flexible regulatory and hybrid delivery models to address the sector’s varied needs, and seek to foster robust digital payment ecosystems to maximize the potential for spillover benefits.