Winkler, Hernán

Person:
Winkler, Hernán

Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Labor economics, Poverty, Inequality, Migration

ORCID

0000-0002-2980-5676

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RePEc
Personal webpage

Departments

Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

Last updated: November 13, 2024

Biography

Hernan Winkler is a Senior Economist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. He specializes in labor economics, migration, and the sources and consequences of inequality and poverty. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of Human Resources. He has led several World Bank reports including Reaping Digital Dividends: Leveraging the Internet for Development in Europe and Central Asia. Before joining the World Bank, he was a Researcher at CEDLAS. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 40

Buffer or Bottleneck? Employment Exposure to Generative AI and the Digital Divide in Latin America
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-01) Gmyrek, Paweł; Winkler, Hernán; Garganta, Santiago
Empirical evidence on the potential impacts of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is mostly focused on high-income countries. In contrast, little is known about the role of this technology on the future economic pathways of developing economies. This paper contributes to fill this gap by estimating the exposure of the Latin American labor market to GenAI. It provides detailed statistics of GenAI exposure between and within countries by leveraging a rich set of harmonized household and labor force surveys. To account for the slower pace of technology adoption in developing economies, it adjusts the measures of exposure to GenAI by using the likelihood of accessing digital technologies at work. This is then used to assess the extent to which the digital divide across and within countries will be a barrier to maximize the productivity gains among occupations that could otherwise be augmented by GenAI tools. The findings show that certain characteristics are consistently correlated with higher exposure. Specifically, urban-based jobs that require higher education, are situated in the formal sector, and are held by individuals with higher incomes are more likely to come into interaction with this technology. Moreover, there is a pronounced tilt toward younger workers facing greater exposure, including the risk of job automation, particularly in the finance, insurance, and public administration sectors. When adjusting for access to digital technologies, the findings show that the digital divide is a major barrier to realizing the positive effects of GenAI on jobs in the region. In particular, nearly half of the positions that could potentially benefit from augmentation are hampered by lack of use of digital technologies. This negative effect of the digital divide is more pronounced in poorer countries.
The Quality of Jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-13) Barreto, Karen; Winkler, Hernán; Diaz Bonilla, Carolina; Sanchez, Diana
The creation of more and better jobs has been a key driver of poverty and inequality reduction.However, while estimates on the number of jobs are available for most countries,comprehensive measures of job quality are not typically reported systematically. This notecontributes to the filling of this gap by studying patterns of job quality across countries and overtime in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This study uses the Job Quality Index (JQI) basedon Brummundi, Mann, and Rodriguez-Castelan (2018), which incorporates four keyemployment characteristics that are key to assessing job quality: earnings, benefits, security,and satisfaction.
September 2024 Update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP): What’s New
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-11) Aron, Danielle V.; Castaneda Aguilar, R. Andres; Diaz-Bonilla, Carolina; Fujs, Tony H. M. J.; Garcia R., Diana C.; Hill, Ruth; Jularbal, Lali; Lakner, Christoph; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Mahler, Daniel G.; Nguyen, Minh C.; Nursamsu, Samuel; Sabatino, Carlos; Sajaia, Zurah; Seitz, William; Sjahrir, Bambang Suharnoko; Tetteh-Baah, Samuel K.; Viveros Mendoza, Martha C.; Winkler, Hernán; Wu, Haoyu; Yonzan, Nishant
The September 2024 update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) introduces several changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. This document details these changes and the methodological reasons behind them. The database now includes 16 new country-years, bringing the total number of surveys to nearly 2,400. This update incorporates new methodologies for measuring global poverty and introduces new indicators of shared prosperity: A Prosperity Gap and the number of economies with high income inequality. It also incorporates two new analytical dashboards: growth incidence curves and poverty decompositions. Depending on the availability of recent survey data, global and regional poverty estimates are reported up to 2022. For the first time, PIP also includes country-level, regional, and global poverty nowcast estimates up to 2024. The September 2024 PIP update presents the poverty and inequality data underlying the forthcoming World Bank’s Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024.
Measuring Green Jobs: A New Database for Latin America and Other Regions
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-06) Winkler, Hernán; Di Maro, Vincenzo; Montoya, Kelly; Olivieri, Sergio; Vazquez, Emmanuel
A growing body of literature investigates the labor market implications of scaling up “green” policies. Since most of this literature is focused on developed economies, little is known about the labor market consequences for developing countries. This paper contributes to filling this gap by providing new stylized facts on the prevalence of green occupations and sectors across countries at varying levels of economic development. Green occupations are defined using the Occupational Information Network, and green sectors are those with relatively lower greenhouse gas emissions per worker. The paper offers an initial assessment of how the implementation of green policies—aimed at expanding green sectors and strengthening the relative demand for green skills—may affect workers in developing economies. It finds that the share of green jobs is strongly correlated with the level of gross domestic product per capita across countries. When controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, a 1 percent increase in gross domestic product per capita is associated with 0.4 and 4.1 percentage point increases in the shares of new and emerging, and enhanced skills green jobs, respectively. The paper then focuses on Latin America and finds that only 9 percent of workers have a green job with respect to both occupation and sector. The findings show that within countries, workers with low levels of income and education are more likely to be employed in non-green sectors and occupations, and to lack the skills for a greener economy. This evidence suggests that complementary policies are needed to mitigate the potential role of green policies in widening income inequality between and within countries.
Explaining the Evolution of Job Tenure in Europe, 1995–2020
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-10) Capelle, Damien; Bussolo, Maurizio; Lokshin, Michael M.; Torre, Iván; Winkler, Hernan
During the last quarter century, job tenure in Europe has shortened. Using data from Eurostat Labor Force Surveys of 29 countries from 1995 to 2020 and applying an age-period-cohort decomposition to analyze changes in tenure for specific birth cohorts, this paper shows that tenure has shrunk for cohorts born in more recent years. To account for compositional changes within cohorts, the analysis estimates the probability of holding jobs of different durations, conditional on individual and employment-related characteristics. The estimations demonstrate that, over time, the likelihood of having a medium- or long-term job decreased and holding a short-term job increased. The paper also finds that stricter job protection legislation appears to decrease the probability of holding a short-term job, and higher trade openness and ICT-related technological change are correlated with an increase of that probability.
Neither by Land nor by Sea: The Rise of Electronic Remittances during COVID-19
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) Dinarte-Diaz, Lelys; Jaume, David; Medina-Cortina, Eduardo; Winkler, Hernan
Despite concerns that the COVID-19 economic collapse would torpedo international remittances, formal remittances to several developing countries ballooned early in the pandemic. This increase might, however, have reflected a shift from informal channels to formal ones rather than a change in actual flows. This paper employs Mexican data to explore this and finds that remittance channels did change. The rise in formal inflows was larger among municipalities that were previously more reliant on informal channels (for example, near a border crossing). Households there also experienced a disproportionate increase in bank accounts opened after lockdown measures. The paper also rules out hypotheses related to the US Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and. Economic Security Act and altruism.
Dominican Republic Jobs Diagnostic
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-05) Montenegro, Miriam; Winkler, Hernan
By many measures, the Dominican Republic experienced a stellar economic performance since the early 2000s. Upon closer inspection, however, progress has been slower than the aggregate indicators suggest. The fact that economic growth did not fully translate into higher job quality may help explain why the country’s poverty indicators only declined at the same average pace as other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, even though its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) grew almost twice as fast as the regional average. This Jobs Diagnostic argues that the main labor market challenge facing the Dominican Republic is how to increase the quality of jobs in a sustained manner. Meeting this challenge is important both for achieving greater poverty reduction and shared prosperity in the medium term, as well as for rendering jobs less vulnerable to the risks posed by longer-term automation and globalization trends. This report presents new findings on the main bottlenecks that are hindering the creation of better jobs in the Dominican Republic and outlines the elements of a jobs strategy that can help remove them.
The Impacts of COVID-19 on Informal Labor Markets: Evidence from Peru
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05) Cueva, Ronald; Del Carpio, Ximena; Winkler, Hernan
This paper provides new evidence on the impacts of the COVID-19 economic crisis on a labor market with a high prevalence of informality. The analysis uses a rich longitudinal household survey for Peru that contains a host of individual and job outcomes before and during the first months of the lockdown in 2020. The findings show that workers who had jobs in non-essential and informal sectors were significantly more likely to become unemployed. In contrast to developed countries, having a job amenable to working from home is not correlated with job loss when controlling for informal status. This is consistent with the high level of labor market segmentation observed in Peru, where high-skilled occupations are disproportionately concentrated in the formal sector, which was also better targeted by policies aimed at supporting firms and job protection during the crisis. In addition, the findings show that women were more likely to lose their jobs because female-dominated sectors are more intensive in face-to-face interactions and thereby more affected by social distancing measures. Increased childcare responsibilities also help explain the worse impacts on women in rural areas. Finally, workers who depended on public transportation before the crisis were more likely to lose their jobs during the early months of the pandemic.
El Salvador Job Diagnostic: Understanding Challenges for More and Better Jobs in El Salvador - An Integrated Approach
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-10-28) Banegas, Nancy; Winkler, Hernan
El Salvador faces significant challenges in the labor market, many of which may not be obvious when looking at aggregate job figures. This report provides a detailed analysis of the Salvadoran labor market between 2000 and 2017 and identifies the main bottlenecks preventing the creation of more and better jobs. It does so in three blocks. First, it describes the main trends in economic growth, its drivers, and implications for job creation. Second, it provides an in-depth analysis of factors constraining the demand for labor. Third, it analyzes which are the skills that the private sector is demanding, and what are the factors contributing to the wide and persistent gender and youth gaps in the labor market. The report concludes with policy recommendations to create more and better jobs in El Salvador.
Does the Internet Reduce Gender Gaps? The Case of Jordan
(Taylor & Francis, 2021-09-24) Viollaz, Mariana; Winkler, Hernan
This article investigates the link between digital technologies and female labor outcomes in a country with one of the lowest female labor force participation (LFP) rates. It exploits the massive roll-out of mobile broadband technology in Jordan between 2010 and 2016 to identify the effect of internet adoption on LFP, internet job search, employment, and unemployment. Using panel data at the individual level and an instrumental variable strategy, the article finds that internet adoption increases female LFP and that the effect is driven by women who were not married in 2010, who also experience declines in marriage and fertility rates in response to internet adoption. An increase in online job search explains some, but not all, of the total increase in female LFP. Only women who are older and have higher levels of education experience an increase in employment in response to gaining internet access. The internet reduces the prevalence of traditional social norms among married women, but this channel does not explain the increase in female LFP.