Robalino, Robalino, David A.

Person:
Robalino, Robalino, David A.

Labor and Youth, Human Development Network, World Bank, Employment and Development Program, German Institute of Labor (IZA)

Fields of Specialization

Labor markets, Social Insurance

External Links

Twitter
IZA

Departments

Labor and Youth, Human Development Network, World Bank
Employment and Development Program, German Institute of Labor (IZA)

Last updated: January 31, 2023

Biography

David Robalino is the Lead Economist and Leader of the Labor and Youth Team in the Human Development Anchor of the World Bank. He also serves as Co-Director of the Employment and Development program at IZA – the Institute for the Study of the Labor. Since joining the Bank David has been working on issues related to social security, labor markets and fiscal policy. He has worked in several countries in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. David has published on issues related to macroeconomics and labor markets, social insurance and pensions, health financing, the economics of HIV/AIDS, and the economics of climate change. More recently David has been working on issues related to the design of unemployment benefits systems in middle income countries, the extension of social insurance programs to the informal sector, and the integration of social protection and education/training policies to improve labor market outcomes and productivity growth. Prior to joining the Bank David was a researcher at the RAND Corporation where he was involved in research on health, population and labor, climate change, and the development of quantitative methods for policy analysis under conditions of uncertainty. David also served in the Presidential Committee for Social Security Reform in Ecuador. David did his graduate studies at the Sorbonne University in Paris and the RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica – California.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 39

Protecting All: Risk Sharing for a Diverse and Diversifying World of Work
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-09-09) Packard, Truman; Gentilini, Ugo; Grosh, Margaret; O’Keefe, Philip; Palacios, Robert; Robalino, David; Santos, Indhira
This white paper focusses on the policy interventions made to help people manage risk, uncertainty and the losses from events whose impacts are channeled primarily through the labor market. The objectives of the white paper are: to scrutinize the relevance and effects of prevailing risk-sharing policies in low- and middle-income countries; take account of how global drivers of disruption shape and diversify how people work; in light of this diversity, propose alternative risk-sharing policies, or ways to augment and improve current policies to be more relevant and responsive to peoples’ needs; and map a reasonable transition path from the current to an alternative policy approach that substantially extends protection to a greater portion of working people and their families. This white paper is a contribution to the broader, global discussion of the changing nature of work and how policy can shape its implications for the wellbeing of people. We use the term risk-sharing policies broadly in reference to the set of institutions, regulations and interventions that societies put in place to help households manage shocks to their livelihoods. These policies include formal rules and structures that regulate market interactions (worker protections and other labor market institutions) that help people pool risks (social assistance and social insurance), to save and insure affordably and effectively (mandatory and incentivized individual savings and other financial instruments) and to recover from losses in the wake of livelihood shocks (“active” reemployment measures). Effective risk-sharing policies are foundational to building equity, resilience and opportunity, the strategic objectives of the World Bank’s Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice. Given failures of factor markets and the market for risk in particular the rationale for policy intervention to augment the options that people have to manage shocks to their livelihoods is well-understood and accepted. By helping to prevent vulnerable people from falling into poverty -and people in the poorest households from falling deeper into poverty- effective risk-sharing interventions dramatically reduce poverty. Households and communities with access to effective risk-sharing instruments can better maintain and continue to invest in these vital assets, first and foremost, their human capital, and in doing so can reduce the likelihood that poverty and vulnerability will be transmitted from one generation to the next. Risk-sharing policies foster enterprise and development by ensuring that people can take appropriate risks required to grasp opportunities and secure their stake in a growing economy.
Allocating Subsidies for Private Investments to Maximize Jobs Impacts
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Romero, Jose Manuel; Robalino, David; Walker, Ian
This paper develops a general framework to allocate subsidies to private investments in the presence of jobs-linked externalities (JLEs). JLEs emerge when wages exceed the opportunity cost of labor (labor externalities), or when there are social gains from creating better jobs for some classes of worker, such as women or youth (social externalities). Like all externalities, JLEs create a gap between private and social rates of return. Investments can be socially profitable (once the corresponding JLEs are internalized) but the private returns may be too low for the firm to go ahead. JLEs help to explain why many developing countries see insufficient investment in projects that would reallocate labor towards better jobs. The concept of JLEs is well established in economic literature, but there is a need for better operational approaches to address them. Like other externalities, JLEs can be corrected using a variety of possible subsidies (such as: grants, subsidized infrastructure, credit, training, technical assistance and tax exemptions). But doing this efficiently and at scale this requires mechanisms to (a) estimate the value of the externality and (b) discover the amount of subsidy needed to trigger the private investment. This paper shows that the optimal way to allocate subsidies to offset JLEs is through a competitive bidding process which selects projects based on the estimated amount of JLEs per dollar of subsidy. The bidding process provides an incentive to investors to reveal the subsidy needed for a project to become privately viable. The authors show that the proposed approach maximizes the jobs impacts of a given amount of fiscal resources that has been allotted to support better jobs outcomes.
Migration and Jobs: Issues for the 21st Century
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019) Gonzalez, Alvaro; Christiaensen, Luc; Robalino, David
With an estimated 724 million extreme poor people living in developing countries, and the world’s demographics bifurcating into an older north and a younger south, there are substantial economic incentives and benefits for people to migrate. There are also important market and regulatory failures that constrain mobility and reduce the net benefits of migration. This paper reviews the recent literature and proposes a conceptual framework to better integrate and coordinate policies for addressing the different market and regulatory failures. The paper advances five types of interventions in need of particular attention in terms of design, implementation and evaluation; namely, 1) active labor market programs that serve local, regional and foreign markets; 2) remittances and investment subsidies to promote job creation and labor productivity growth; 3) social insurance programs that cover all jobs and facilitate labor mobility; 4) labor taxes to internalize the social costs of migration in receiving regions; and 5) more flexible, private sector driven schemes to regulate the flow of migrants and minimize irregular migration.
Migration and Jobs: Issues for the 21st Century
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-05) Gonzalez, Alvaro; Christiaensen, Luc; Robalino, David
With an estimated 724 million extreme poor people living in developing countries, and the world's demographics bifurcating into an older North and a younger South, there are substantial economic incentives and benefits for people to migrate. There are also important market and regulatory failures that constrain mobility and reduce the net benefits of migration. This paper reviews the recent literature and proposes a conceptual framework for better integration and coordination of policies that can address the different market and regulatory failures. The paper advances five types of interventions in need of particular attention in design, implementation, and evaluation; namely, (1) active labor market programs that serve local, regional, and foreign markets; (2) remittances and investment subsidies to promote job creation and labor productivity growth; (3) social insurance programs that cover all jobs and facilitate labor mobility; (4) labor taxes to internalize the social costs of migration in receiving regions; and (5) more flexible private sector driven schemes to regulate the flow of migrants and minimize irregular migration.
Nonfinancial Defined Contribution Pension Schemes in a Changing Pension World : Volume 2. Gender, Politics, and Financial Stability
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013) Holzmann, Robert; Palmer, Edward; Robalino, David; Holzmann, Robert; Palmer, Palmer; Robalino, David
The concept of nonfinancial (notional) defined contribution (NDC) was born in the early 1990s and implemented from the mid-1990s in a number of countries. This innovative unfunded individual account scheme emerged and created high hopes at a time when the world seemed to have been locked into a stalemate between making piecemeal reforms of ailing traditional pay- as-you-go defined benefit schemes and introducing prefunded financial account schemes. Nonfinancial (notional) defined contribution (NDC) plans are designed to eliminate the work disincentives and nontransparent redistributions of defined benefit (DB) social security schemes without the transition costs and risk shifting that occurs in the context of a switch to a funded defined contribution (DC) scheme. To a large extent, they sweep away the special privileges that, intentionally or inadvertently, accrue to various groups in traditional schemes and pay everyone in accordance with his or her own contributions. However, not surprisingly, these new provisions will have different effects on diverse population subgroups, including men and women. Most of the effects do not stem from explicit gender-specific provisions in the plans, but rather from the interaction of gender-free policies with differing demographic and employment characteristics of men and women. The same policies affect the two genders differently because of the more limited labor force attachment of women as a result of their childbearing and childrearing roles, their lower earnings when they do work, their longer life expectancy, and the likelihood that they will eventually become widows and live alone in very old age. Both financial defined contribution (FDC) and NDC plans make certain design choices explicit that are implicit in DB plans. Although this feature allows for more informed decision making, it can also be politically sensitive and divisive. In some cases, the decision process is simpler for NDC plans than for FDC plans. NDC plans do not have individual investments and, therefore, do not have the problems that FDCs face and that stem from decentralized investment decisions.
Economic Analysis of Jobs Investment Projects
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-08-01) Walker, David Ian; Robalino, David A.
This Note systematizes the economic evaluation of Jobs Investment Projects. It explains the limitations of past approaches that have regarded jobs only as a by-product of growth. It focuses on market failures that create a gap between the social and private return on investments and reduce the number of good jobs below the socially optimal level. Two of these market failures are: labor externalities arising from the divergence between the market price and opportunity cost of labor; and social jobs externalities linked to improved jobs outcomes for groups such as youth, women, and the extreme poor. These externalities can amplify other market failures such as learning spillovers and coordination failures. The analysis is integrated within a Cost-Benefit framework, to facilitate decision making around jobs investment programs. The Note discusses applications to different sorts of projects: those that focus on improving the labor supply and labor market matches; those that focus on strengthening firms' demand for labor; and integrated projects, that include both types of interventions.
NDC Schemes and the Labor Market: Issues and Options
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-04) Holzmann, Robert; Robalino, David; Winkler, Hernan
Defined contribution (DC) schemes whether unfunded or funded are often considered superior to defined benefit (DB) schemes in their ability to address labor market issues, particularly in encouraging formal employment and delayed retirement. Conceptually, the assessment is based on superior incentives to work and save. Yet economic and social realities are more complex. This paper explores design and labor market conditions that potentially constrain DC schemes. The paper concludes that to achieve their conceptual potential, DC schemes require design innovations, including a better integration of basic provisions and complementary labor policies that promote job creation in the formal sector and expand job opportunities during old age.
Lending for Jobs Operations
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-12) Tokle, Siv; Robalino, David
This paper develops a general framework to inform the design of a new generation of jobs lending operations. The paper discusses the rationale for developing jobs focused lending operations with specific targets in terms of job creation, job quality, and labor markets outcomes for vulnerable population groups. It reviews the current portfolio of jobs-flagged lending operations, discusses the limitations of existing interventions, and outlines options to optimize countries lending portfolios and develop new, integrated, jobs lending operations on the basis of jobs diagnostics and jobs strategies. The paper provides examples of innovative projects that are currently under preparation or implementation, including jobs investment projects that link supply-side and demand side interventions; jobs Program for Results (PforRs), and jobs Development Policy Lending. The final section describes the types of monitoring and evaluation systems that these new projects would require to track jobs outcomes.
From Right to Reality : Incentives, Labor Markets, and the Challenge of Universal Social Protection in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012-03-13) Ribe, Helena; Robalino, David A.; Walker, Ian
This series was created in 2003 to promote debate, disseminate information and analysis, and convey the excitement and complexity of the most topical issues in economic and social development in Latin America and the Caribbean. This volume aims to move the debate forward by: 1) developing a common policy framework for the region's Social Protection (SP) system as a whole, including health insurance; 2) providing guidelines on ways to extend coverage through rationalizing financing mechanisms and the design of redistributive arrangements; and 3) making the case for improved coordination of policies and programs. Building on careful, detailed analysis of a wealth of data on social protection programs across Latin America and the Caribbean, this book addresses these challenges in a thorough yet accessible manner. Although the analysis is comprehensive, the authors focus primarily on three fundamental questions that must be faced by any effort to strengthen social protection in the region: how can programs protect the most vulnerable without promoting informality and dampening incentives to work and save? How can programs ensure that scarce public resources are used for subsidies that are transparent, fair, and effective-and not for badly targeted and regressive benefits for formal sector workers? Finally, how can programs reinforce human capital development so that the more mobile workers that the region needs are able to insure themselves through savings or risk-pooling arrangements, thus reducing vulnerability and the need for subsidies?
Skills and Jobs: Lessons Learned and Options for Collaboration
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05) Lord, Nick; Sanchez Puerta, Maria Laura; Perinet, Mathilde; Robalino, David A.; Strokova, Victoria
The accumulation of human capital through the acquisition of knowledge and skills is recognized as central for economic development. More-educated workers not only have better employment opportunities, they earn more and have more stable and rewarding jobs. They are also more adaptable and mobile. Workers who acquire more skills make other workers and capital more productive and, within the firm, they facilitate the adaptation, adoption, and ultimately invention of new technologies. This is crucial for economic diversification, productivity growth, and ultimately raising the living standards of living of the population. The structure of the note is as follows. First, it examines the different types of market failures, and subsequently reviews the role that governments have played in training systems around the world. Finally it offers a set of proposals for reforming and improving these systems to improve labor market outcomes.