Person:
Almeida, Rita
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Skills development policy,
Labor markets,
Social protection,
Firm productivity,
Innovation policy
Degrees
Departments
Global Practice on Education, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
August 7, 2023
Biography
Rita K. Almeida earned her earned her PhD in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2004 and her Licenciatura in Economics, from Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon in 1997 with honors. She is a senior economist at the World Bank’s Education Global Practice. Since joining the World Bank in 2002, Rita has led policy dialogue on a broad set of regions and countries, including Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa. Prior to joining the World Bank, she worked in a private investment bank and taught graduate and undergraduate Economics at the Portuguese Catholic University. She is also a fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor since 2003.
Her main areas of expertise cover education policies, labor market analysis, training and life-long learning skills development policies, activation and graduation policies, labor market regulations, social protection for workers, firm productivity and innovation policies, public expenditure reviews and the evaluation of social programs. Over the years, Almeida has led and contributed to several World Bank flagship publications including “The Right Skills for the Job? Rethinking Training Policies for Workers” and “Toward more efficient and effective public social spending in Central America”. Her work has been covered in the media and her research has been featured in leading world economic reports. Her academic work has been published in a variety of top general-interest and specialized journals, including The Economic Journal, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Labour Economics, and World Development.
Publication Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
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Publication
Assessing Advances and Challenges in Technical Education in Brazil
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016)As Brazil is massively investing in a scale-up of in vocational education and training (VET) through the national flagship program, PRONATEC, this report assesses institutions and policies in VET taking an in depth critical view of upcoming opportunities. It shares international best practices on selected operational issues identified as strategic bottlenecks for the delivery of technical education. The report explores multiple sources of information including a desk review of existing reports and papers, inputs/data provided by the Ministry of Education and interviews with multiple stakeholders and practitioners at the federal and state level. The report highlights the need of promoting a better alignment between the supply and demand of skills at the sub national level and of promoting better a solid monitoring and evaluation system, including the monitoring of student learning and of the trajectories into the labor market or into higher educational degrees. Issues of student career guidance and teacher quality also emerge as areas of strategic importance to the Brazilian VET system in the years ahead. -
Publication
Investing in Technical and Vocational Education and Training: Does it Yield Large Economic Returns in Brazil?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04)Technical education and training has been dramatically expanding in Brazil recently. However, there remains no evidence on the cost effectiveness of this alternative track to a more general education. This paper quantifies the wage returns of completing technical and vocational education and training compared with the returns of completing the general education track, for individuals with similar observable characteristics. Exploring data from the Brazilian National Household Sample Survey, the paper profiles the students taking up this track and quantifies the impact of different types of technical and vocational education and training courses on individuals’ hourly wages. After controlling for selection on observables with propensity score matching, the analysis shows positive and statistically significant wage premiums for students completing technical school at the upper secondary level (on average 9.7 percent ) and for those completing short-term training courses (2.2 percent on average). The paper also documents significant heterogeneity of impacts depending on the courses and the profile of students. For realistic unitary costs of providing technical and vocational education and training, the evidence suggests technical education is a cost-effective modality. The courses offered by the publically financed and privately managed “Sistema S,” together with courses in the manufacturing area have the highest positive impacts. -
Publication
Skills and Jobs in Brazil: An Agenda for Youth
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-07-10)Skills and Jobs in Brazil: An Agenda for Youth is a new report focusing on the challenge of economic engagement among the Brazilian youth. In the context of a fast aging population, Brazil’s greatest economic opportunity is to increase its labor productivity, especially that of youth. This report documents important new facts about the extent of the youth economic disengagement, while at school and at work. Today, close to half of the Brazilian youth aged 15-29 years old is not fully economically engaged, because they are neither working nor studying, are studying in schools of poor quality, or are working in informal and precarious jobs. The report shows how the youth prospects in the labor market are dimmed by policies favoring existing workers over new entrants; in addition, it shows how youth are often ill equipped to meet an increasingly challenging labor market. The report suggests new education, skills, and jobs policy changes that Brazil could prioritize moving forward, so that it can take advantage of the last wave of its demographic transition. The report discusses in particular depth policies aiming to increase learning and reduce school dropouts in upper secondary education, and labor market policies that aim to support more effective and faster youth transitions from school to work. -
Publication
Inequality and Employment in a Dual Economy: Enforcement of Labor Regulation in Brazil
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-11-17)This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations on unemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricter enforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higher unemployment, less income inequality, a higher proportion of formal employment, and a lower formal wage premium. Our results are consistent with a model where stricter enforcement causes a contraction in labor demand in both the formal and informal sectors; and where workers value mandated benefits highly, so that there is an increase in the formal sector labor supply, an increase in the willingness to become unemployed to search for a formal sector job, and a decrease in labor supply to the informal sector. -
Publication
The Impact of Digital Technologies on Routine Tasks: Do Labor Policies Matter?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-09)There is a strong concern that technology is increasingly replacing routine tasks, displacing lower-skilled workers. Labor market institutions exist to protect workers from shocks but, by increasing labor costs, labor policy may also constrain firms from adjusting the workforce and, hence, from fully benefiting from technology adoption. This paper assesses the link between access to digital technologies and the demand for skills in the largest Latin American country, Brazil. Between 1996 and 2006, the country experienced a period of strong growth in Internet service provision, as well as in the enforcement of labor market regulations at the subnational level. The paper's empirical strategy exploits administrative data to assess the extent to which the adoption of digital technology affects employment and the skill content of jobs at the local level. In addition, the paper investigates whether the stringency of labor regulations influences this adjustment, by comparing the effect across industries subject to different degrees of enforcement of labor regulations. Using the fact that industries vary in the degree of reliance on digital technologies, the estimates suggest that digital technology adoption leads to a reduction in employment in local labor markets. The decrease in employment is larger for routine tasks, thereby shifting the composition of the workforce toward nonroutine, cognitive skills. However, and in contrast with labor policy intentions, the evidence points to the idea that labor market regulations differentially benefit the skilled workforce, particularly those workers employed in nonroutine, cognitive tasks. -
Publication
The Jobs of Tomorrow: Technology, Productivity, and Prosperity in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-04-10)While adoption of new technologies is understood to enhance long-term growth and average per-capita incomes, its impact on lower-skilled workers is more complex and merits clarification. Concerns abound that advanced technologies developed in high-income countries would inexorably lead to job losses of lower-skilled, less well-off workers and exacerbate inequality. Conversely, there are countervailing concerns that policies intended to protect jobs from technology advancement would themselves stultify progress and depress productivity. This book squarely addresses both sets of concerns with new research showing that adoption of digital technologies offers a pathway to more inclusive growth by increasing adopting firms’ outputs, with the jobs-enhancing impact of technology adoption assisted by growth-enhancing policies that foster sizable output expansion. The research reported here demonstrates with economic theory and data from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico that lower-skilled workers can benefit from adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies biased towards skilled workers, and often do. The inclusive jobs outcomes arise when the effects of increased productivity and expanding output overcome the substitution of workers for technology. While the substitution effect replaces some lower-skilled workers with new technology and more highly-skilled labor, the output effect can lead to an increase in the total number of jobs for less-skilled workers. Critically, output can increase sufficiently to increase jobs across all tasks and skill types within adopting firms, including jobs for lower-skilled workers, as long as lower-skilled task content remains complementary to new technologies and related occupations are not completely automated and replaced by machines. It is this channel for inclusive growth that underlies the power of pro-competitive enabling policies and institutions—such as regulations encouraging firms to compete and policies supporting the development of skills that technology augments rather than replaces—to ensure that the positive impact of technology adoption on productivity and lower-skilled workers is realized.