Person: Hollweg, Claire H.
Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment Global Practice
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International trade, Global value chains, Services, Labor markets, Development economics
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Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment Global Practice
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Claire H. Hollweg is a senior economist with the Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment Global Practice of the World Bank. Before studying economics, she worked as a journalist. She has worked with the government of South Australia and the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council in Singapore. Her research interests include development economics, with a focus on the nexus between trade, labor markets, servicification of manufacturing, and upgrading in global value chains. She holds a PhD and an MA in economics from the University of Adelaide.
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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
Publication The Labor Impact of Lao Export Growth(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-02) Ruppert Bulmer, Elizabeth; Hollweg, Claire H.As countries become increasingly integrated into the global economy, increased trade links with other countries translate into increased access to better or cheaper imports and increased demand for exports. Both can have an impact on consumers, producers and workers through household consumption, household production, and labor incentives. The channels through which increased trade integration can affect labor include: (i) the consumption channel, typically leading to an increase in purchasing power and therefore higher real wages, and (ii) the employment effect due to increased labor demand. The extent of these gains to trade will depend on the incidence of trade policies or trade shocks; in other words, the impact will depend on which products become less expensive, which sectors increase demand for skilled or unskilled labor, and which workers can access these new jobs. This report utilizes a range of methodologies and datasets that implicitly link trade and jobs; by using these complementary analytical approaches, we generate multiple perspectives on Lao PDR’s recent labor market outcomes, and their implications for Lao PDR’s current and future trade competitiveness.Publication What is Behind Labor Mobility Costs? Evidence from Indonesia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09) Cali, Massimiliano; Hidayat, Taufik; Hollweg, Claire H.The ability of workers to transition to a new job is crucial to determine the resilience of an economy to (positive or negative) shocks. This paper provides new evidence on the factors that affect labor mobility by using labor data on Indonesia, one of countries with the higher estimated labor mobility costs. To do so it investigates correlates of the probability of an individual finding a job after a negative labor market shock, as well as of the duration of job search. The results show that higher housing prices are associated with higher mobility costs, suggesting that housing benefits or policies that increase the supply of housing may help reduce mobility costs in Indonesia. More generally, public expenditure on infrastructure seems to reduce labor mobility costs, particularly in urban areas, consistently with a reduction in transaction costs – such as urban transport. The results also highlight that formal institutional mechanisms such as job advertisements do not appear to work effectively to help labor mobility in Indonesia, suggesting the need to re-think active labor market policies. On the other hand, minimum wage level – a key outcome of labor market policy - does not appear to affect labor mobility. Labor mobility costs seem higher in urban areas, which could indicate a lower opportunity cost of joblessness than in rural area, employment composition skewed towards sectors with higher mobility costs and/or large congestion costs that negatively affect labor mobility. On the other hand, the general female penalty in labor mobility is less accentuated in urban areas, which may be the result of sectoral composition and/or less discriminatory cultural norms than in rural areas.Publication Cambodia’s Future Jobs: Linking to the Economy of Tomorrow(World Bank, Phnom Penh, 2019) Cunningham, Wendy; Hollweg, Claire H.Jobs are an important part of Cambodia’s story of development success. There are eight million jobs in Cambodia, and eighty percent of Cambodian adults above the age of fifteen are working in contrast to 62.5 percent of adults in East Asia Pacific region. Cambodia will need to enact substantive reforms to secure more, better, and more inclusive jobs in the long term. Fundamentally, Cambodia needs to upgrade and integrate the two sides of its economy namely the exports sector, which includes foreign- owned (FDI) firms, and the domestic sector made up of household enterprises (HHEs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Meanwhile, Cambodian workers need to increase their skills and ability to pursue the job opportunities that will materialize as these sectors increase their competitiveness.Publication Exporting and Female Labor Market Outcomes in Georgia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10) Ong Lopez, Anne; Hollweg, Claire H.Using firm-level data for Georgia, the paper estimates the quasi-elasticity of employment and wages with respect to the share of exports in total sales, to explore whether changes in the structure of sales (exporting versus selling to the domestic market) matter for labor market outcomes. The methodology uses exogenous fluctuations in exchange rates combined with firms' initial exposure to various markets as instrumental variables to identify a causal effect. The results differentiate employment levels and average wages by gender and consider whether export destination or the competiveness of economies matters for the magnitude of this elasticity. The data are from the National Statistics Office of Georgia Statistics Survey of Enterprises merged with customs data for 2006-17. The instrumental variables regression results show that the act of exporting improves female employment but reduces overall average wages and female wages. Increasing exports to the European Union as well as high-income countries drives this positive result for female employment, whereas exporting to upper-middle-income countries is found to have a negative relationship with female employment.Publication The Labor Content of Exports Database(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03) Cali, Massimiliano; Francois, Joseph; Hollweg, Claire H.; Manchin, Miriam; Oberdabernig, Doris Anita; Rojas-Romagosa, Hugo; Rubinova, Stela; Tomberger, PatrickThis paper develops a novel methodology to measure the quantity of jobs and value of wages embodied in exports for a large number of countries and sectors for intermittent years between 1995 and 2011. The resulting Labor Content of Exports database allows the examination of the direct contribution of labor to exports as well as the indirect contribution via other sectors of the economy for skilled and unskilled labor. The analysis of the new data sets documents several new findings. First, the global share of labor value added in exports has been declining globally since 1995, but it has increased in low-income countries. Second, in line with the standard Hecksher-Ohlin trade model, the composition of labor directly contained in exports is skewed toward skilled labor in high-income countries relative to developing countries. However, that is not the case for the indirect labor content of exports. Third, manufacturing exports are a key source of labor demand in other sectors, especially in middle- and low-income countries. And the majority of the indirect demand for labor spurred by exports is in services sectors, whose workers are the largest beneficiaries of exporting activities globally. Fourth, differences in the labor value added in exports share across developing countries appears to be driven more by differences in the composition of exports rather than in sector labor intensities. Finally, average wages typically increase rapidly enough with the process of economic development to more than compensate the loss in jobs per unit of exports. The paper also includes the necessary information to build the Labor Content of Exports database from the original raw data, including stata do-files and matlab files, as well as descriptions of the variables in the data set.Publication Seeking Shared Prosperity through Trade(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06) Cali, Massimiliano; Hollweg, Claire H.; Ruppert Bulmer, ElizabethIncreasing the trade integration of developing countries can make a vital contribution to boosting shared prosperity, but it also exposes producers and consumers to exogenous shocks that alter relative prices, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. This paper discusses the short-run effects of trade-related shocks on households to capture the potential welfare impact on the poor. The discussion explores the channels through which trade shocks are transmitted to households in the bottom of the income distribution, namely through consumption, household production, and market-based labor activities. The degree to which price shocks are passed through from borders to point of sale is a key determinant of the gains from trade and the ultimate welfare impact. Trade changes in agriculture directly affect households through their consumption basket. Lower agricultural prices reduce the cost of consumables, but these welfare gains may be offset by lower earnings for households that produce these same goods. Poorer households tend to be net consumers of agricultural products, suggesting a net welfare gain, but agricultural wage workers could suffer from wage cuts. Because poorer households tend to consume relatively fewer nonagricultural products, that is nonessentials, any trade-related shocks to prices of nonagricultural product are likely to be transmitted via labor channels. Despite significant evidence that nonagricultural trade reform ultimately leads to job creation and enhanced productivity, the short-run effects can be mixed. The costs incurred by workers to transition to new jobs slow the adjustment of the economy to a new steady state. Labor mobility costs, which tend to be higher in developing countries and for unskilled workers, reduce the potential gains to trade by diverting labor market adjustment from its most efficient path.Publication Trade in Global Value Chains: An Assessment of Labor Market Implications(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-07-16) Farole, Thomas; Hollweg, Claire; Winkler, DeborahThe paper is structured in six further sections following this introduction. Section two develops a conceptual framework, and reviews the literature on the relationship between trade integration and labor market outcomes. Section three outlines the empirical framework and data used in the analysis. Section four presents results on the relationship between overall trade integration (through exports) and labor market outcomes. Section five then focuses specifically on GVC trade, and assesses the relationship between labor market outcomes and GVC integration as a buyer and as a seller. Section six tests if select policy indicators mediate these relationships between trade integration and labor market outcomes. Finally, section seven concludes, with a summary of results and areas for future research.