2014-06, Enamorado, Ted, López-Calva, Luis-Felipe, Rodriguez Castelan, Carlos, Winkler, Hernán

The relationship between income inequality and crime has attracted the interest of many researchers, but little convincing evidence exists on the causal effect of inequality on crime in developing countries. This paper estimates this effect in a unique context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis takes advantage of a unique data set containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities covering a period of 20 years. Using an instrumental variable for inequality that tackles problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias, this paper finds that an increment of one point in the Gini coefficient translates into an increase of more than 10 drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2010. There are no significant effects before 2005. The fact that the effect was found during Mexico's Drug War and not before is likely because the cost of crime decreased with the proliferation of gangs (facilitating access to knowledge and logistics, lowering the marginal cost of criminal behavior), which, combined with rising inequality, increased the expected net benefit from criminal acts after 2005.

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.

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.

2016-05, Enamorado, Ted, López-Calva, Luis F., Rodríguez-Castelán, Carlos, Winkler, Hernán

The goal of this paper is to examine the effect of inequality on crime rates in a unique context, Mexico's drug war. The analysis exploits an original dataset containing inequality and crime statistics on more than 2000 Mexican municipalities over a 20-year period. To uncover the causal effect of inequality on crime, we use an instrumental variable for the Gini coefficient that combines the initial income distribution at the municipality level with national trends. Our estimates indicate that a one-point increment in the Gini coefficient between 2007 and 2010 translates into an increase of more that 36% in the number of drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The fact that the effect found during the drug war is substantially greater is likely caused by the rise in rents to be extracted through crime and an expansion in the employment opportunities in the illegal sector through the proliferation of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), accompanied by a decline in legal job opportunities and a reduction in the probability of being caught given the resource constraints faced by the law enforcement system. Combined, the latter factors made the expected benefits of criminal activity shift in a socially undesirable direction after 2007.

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.

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.

2020-07, Garrote Sánchez, Daniel, Gomez Parra, Nicolas, Ozden, Caglar, Rijkers, Bob, Viollaz, Mariana, Winkler, Hernan

This paper presents new estimates of the share of jobs that can be performed from home. The analysis is based on the task content of occupations, their information and communications technology requirements, and the availability of internet access by country and income groupings. Globally, one of every five jobs can be performed from home. The ability to telework is correlated with income. In low-income countries, only one of every 26 jobs can be done from home. Failing to account for internet access yields upward biased estimates of the resilience of poor countries, lagging regions, and poor workers. Since better paid workers are more likely to be able to work from home, COVID-19 is likely to exacerbate inequality, especially in richer countries where better paid and educated workers are insulated from the shock. The overall labor market burden of COVID-19 is bound to be larger in poor countries, where only a small share of workers can work from home and social protection systems are weaker. Across the globe, young, poorly educated workers and those on temporary contracts are least likely to be able to work from home and more vulnerable to the labor market shocks from COVID-19.

2016-12-09, Winkler, Hernan

This article provides new evidence on the impact of the internet on migration decisions. I find that an increase in internet adoption among migrant-sending countries reduces the stock of migrants from these locations. The results are robust to a number of specifications, including an instrumental variable approach that addresses the endogeneity of internet adoption. The findings suggest that the internet may weaken the importance of push factors in the decision to migrate, and that these effects outweigh declines in mobility costs.

2022-10, 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.

2017-03-07, Liaplina, Aleksandra, Kelly, Tim, Tan, Shawn W., Winkler, Hernan

From East to West, the economies of Europe and Central Asia (ECA) are not taking full advantage of the internet to foster economic growth and job creation. The residents of Central Asia and the South Caucasus pay some of the highest prices in the world for internet connections that are slow and unreliable. In contrast, Europe enjoys some of the world’s fastest and affordable internet services. However, its firms and individuals are not fully exploiting the internet to achieve higher productivity growth as well as more and better jobs. Reaping Digital Dividends investigates the barriers that are holding back the broader adoption of the internet in ECA. The report identifies the main bottlenecks and provides policy recommendations tailored to economies at varying levels of digital development. It concludes that policies to increase internet access are necessary but not sufficient. Policies to foster competition, international trade and skills supply, as well as adapting regulations to the changing business environment and labor markets, will also be necessary. In other words, Reaping Digital Dividends not only requires better connectivity, but also complementary factors that allow governments, firms and individuals to make the most out of it.