Person:
Almeida, Rita

Global Practice on Education, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Skills development policy, Labor markets, Social protection, Firm productivity, Innovation policy

Departments

Global Practice on Education, The World Bank

Last updated January 31, 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.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12

Jump-Starting Self-Employment? Evidence Among Welfare Participants in Argentina

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-06) Almeida, Rita ; Galasso, Emanuela

One important concern of governments in developing countries is how to phase out large safety net programs. The authors evaluate the short-run effects of one possible exit strategy-programs that promote self-employment-in Argentina. They provide evidence that a small fraction of beneficiaries were attracted by this program. Overall, potential participants to self-employment are more likely to be female household heads and more educated beneficiaries relative to the average Jefes beneficiaries. Using nonexperimental methods, the authors show that participation in the program does affect the labor supply of participants, by reducing the probability of having an outside job, especially for males, and increasing the total number of hours worked. But the intervention fails to produce on average income gains to participating individuals and households in the short run. The fact that a small subset of former welfare beneficiaries are attracted to the program, coupled with the fact that only a subset of participants (younger and more educated beneficiaries, and with previous self-employment experience) benefited from participation has important implications for this intervention to represent a viable exit strategy from welfare.
Assessing Advances and Challenges in Technical Education in Brazil

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016) Almeida, Rita ; Amaral, Nicole ; de Felicio, Fabiana

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.
Assessing the Impacts of Mais Educacao on Educational Outcomes: Evidence between 2007 and 2011

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04) Almeida, Rita ; Bresolin, Antonio ; Borges, Bruna ; Mendes, Karen ; Menezes-Filho, Naercio

To address the educational gap, many Latin American countries are focusing on extension of the school day and enrichment of the curriculum. In Brazil, a nationwide policy -- Mais Educação -- was implemented in 2008 with this objective. This paper explores the nationwide rollout of the program across the country and compares the performance of schools before and after implementation of the program. The paper quantifies the impacts of the program on student learning and dropout rates in urban areas, and investigates the heterogeneity of impacts by several characteristics of the program's implementation. Participating schools are compared with nonparticipating schools after controlling for school selection into the program based on observable characteristics using propensity score matching. The analysis finds that participation in Mais Educação has on average no impacts on school dropout rates and average negative impacts on mathematics test scores. The negative impacts on student achievement are stronger in the short term, which suggests that the negative effects may be reduced as the program improves its implementation. In addition, especially for fifth-grade schools, the level of student spending is associated with reduced dropout rates. Interestingly, in schools choosing the fields of Portuguese and/or sports in the added hours, the program is associated with lower test scores in Portuguese and mathematics. Finally, for the sample of fifth-grade schools, heterogeneous impacts are seen in the program according to the GDP per capita of the city where the school is located. The higher the GDP per capita, the greater the positive impact of the program on mathematics test scores and on dropout rates.
Skills and Jobs in Brazil: An Agenda for Youth

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-07-10) Almeida, Rita K. ; Packard, Truman G.

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.
Software Adoption, Employment Composition and the Skill Content of Occupations in Chilean Firms

(Taylor and Francis, 2018-12-10) Almeida, Rita K. ; Fernandes, Ana M. ; Viollaz, Mariana

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.
Inequality and Employment in a Dual Economy: Enforcement of Labor Regulation in Brazil

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-11-17) Almeida, Rita ; Carneiro, Pedro

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.
Women in Paid Employment: A Role for Public Policies and Social Norms in Guatemala

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01) Almeida, Rita K. ; Viollaz, Mariana

With only 32 percent of working-age women in the labor market, Guatemala is an upper-middle-income country with one of the lowest rates of female labor force participation in the Latin America and the Caribbean region, and in the world. The rate of female labor force participation is especially low in the poor regions of the North and the Northwest. This paper explores information from different micro data sets, including the most recent Population Census (2002 and 2018) to assess the drivers of the recent progress. Between 2002 and 2018, the female labor force participation rate increased 5.7 percentage points, from an average of 26 to 32 percent nationwide. This increase was partly explained by the drastic increases in the educational attainment of women, the reduction in fertility, and the country’s structural transformation toward services. However, a large component remains unexplained. Exploring 2018 data, the paper shows that social norms, attitudes toward women in society, and public policies are important determinants of these changes. The analysis suggests that, taken together, these factors can all become an important source of increased female labor force participation moving forward.
Toward More Efficient and Effective Public Social Spending in Central America

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05-18) Acosta, Pablo A. ; Almeida, Rita ; Gindling, Thomas ; Lao Pena, Christine

Central America has come a long way both in terms of economic and political stability. Increasingly the region is focusing on implementing productivity-enhancing reforms as well as supporting reductions in poverty and inequality. This report analyzes recent trends in public social spending in Central America from 2007 to 2014, conducts international benchmarking, examines measures of the effectiveness and efficiency of social spending, and discusses the quality of selected institutions influencing this spending. We examine total social spending, as well as detailing its four components: public spending on the education, health, and social protection and labor (SPL) sectors. In analyzing public social spending, the report addresses three crucial policy issues: (a) how to improve the coverage and redistributional incidence of public social spending; (b) how to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of public social spending; and (c) how to strengthen the institutions governing public spending in the social sector. While based heavily on a series of recent analytical social spending studies in six countries in the subregion—Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama—this report also takes a broader regional perspective and includes some comparisons to countries in other regions.
The Impact of Digital Technologies on Routine Tasks: Do Labor Policies Matter?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-09) Almeida, Rita K. ; Corseuil, Carlos H.L. ; Poole, Jennifer P.

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.
Does the Adoption of Complex Software Impact Employment Composition and the Skill Content of Occupations?: Evidence from Chilean Firms

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06) Almeida, Rita K. ; Fernandes, Ana M. ; Viollaz, Mariana

A major concern with the rapid spread of technology is that it replaces some jobs, displacing workers. However, technology may raise firm productivity, generating more jobs. The paper contributes to this debate by exploiting a novel panel data set for Chilean firms in all sectors between 2007 and 2013. While previous studies examine the impacts of automation on the use of routine tasks by middle-educated workers. this study focuses on a measure of complex software that is typically used by more educated workers in cognitive and nonroutine tasks for client, production, and business management. The instrumental variables estimates show that in the medium run, firms' adoption of complex software affects firms' employment decisions and the skill content of occupations. The adoption of complex software reallocates employment from skilled workers to administrative and unskilled production workers. This reallocation leads to an increase in the use of routine and manual tasks and a reduction in the use of abstract tasks within firms. Interestingly, the impacts tend to be concentrated in sectors with a less educated workforce, suggesting that technology can constrain job creation for the more skilled workers there. The paper concludes that the type of technology matters for understanding the impacts of technology adoption on the labor market.