2019-06-04, Hollweg, Claire H., Sáez, Sebastián

Recognizing that services affect the ability of countries and their firms to compete on international markets, the World Bank’s Trade and Regional Integration Unit has developed an extensive work program to promote the performance of countries’ domestic services sectors, including services trade. Services for Trade Competitiveness presents selected applications of new methodologies that were developed to assess the competitiveness of countries’ services sectors, discern the types of barriers to services that exist in the regulatory environment, and identify the resulting policy implications. Its assessments are designed for a wide audience, including policy makers in developing countries and development practitioners in international organizations, policy-making institutions, and academia. The purpose of this book is to help developing countries make informed policy choices to increase their chances of benefiting from the increasing prominence of services in international trade.

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.

2016-03, Cali, Massimiliano, Francois, Joseph, Hollweg, Claire H., Manchin, Miriam, Oberdabernig, Doris Anita, Rojas-Romagosa, Hugo, Rubinova, Stela, Tomberger, Patrick

This 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.

2014-11, Mitra, Devashish, Hollweg, Claire H., Lederman, Daniel

This paper explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive set of macro-level labor-market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, the average wage index, and overall and female employment levels and labor force participation rates. Together these outcome variables capture the overall health of the labor market and the aggregate welfare of workers. Yet, there seems to be no other comprehensive empirical investigation in the existing literature of the impact of structural reforms at the cross-country macro level on labor-market outcomes other than the unemployment rate. Data were collected from a variety of sources, including the World Bank World Development Indicators, the International Monetary Fund International Financial Statistics, and the International Labor Organization Key Indicators of the Labor Market. The resulting dataset covers up to 88 countries, the majority being developing, for 10 years on either side of structural reforms that took place between 1960 and 2001. After documenting the average trends across countries in the labor-market outcomes up to 10 years on either side of each country s structural reform year, the authors run fixed-effects ordinary least squares as well as instrumental variables regressions to account for the likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labor-market outcomes. Overall the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labor. Unlike related literature, the paper does not find conclusive evidence on unemployment. Redistributive effects in favor of workers, along the lines of the Stolper-Samuelson effect, may be at work.

2018-07-16, Farole, Thomas, Hollweg, Claire, Winkler, Deborah

The 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.

2015-01, Calì, Massimiliano, Hollweg, Claire

The LACEX dataset has been recently assembled to compute the (direct and indirect) value of the compensation of employees linked to exports for each sector/country/year. The data has been computed on the basis of a panel of global input-output data spanning intermittent years from 1995 to 2007 from the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP). This represents a form of social accounting data - a variation on the social accounting matrix (SAM) where incomes are shown in the rows of the SAM while expenditures are shown in the columns. The structure of the data provides a comprehensive and consistent record of national income accounting relationships between different sectors and regions, including intermediate and final demand linkages. This structure of the dataset allows one to obtain the value added content of final output and exports, including its compensation of employees’ component. That includes both the direct and indirect compensation, based on the backward linkages of each sector with the rest of the economy. In order to obtain these labor value added measures, two intermediate multiplier matrixes need to be calculated. The first is the Leontief inverse matrix, which measures the inputs contained in a unit of final output. This matrix contains both direct and indirect inputs. Next, one needs to calculate a matrix which has the compensation of employees’ shares of total output. Using these two matrixes as multipliers one can obtain the compensation of employees’ shares of exports and final outputs. These shares are also split between skilled and unskilled workers.

2013-05, Cusolito, Ana Paula, Hollweg, Claire H.

Despite trade liberalization efforts made by Eurasian countries, the export structure of the region shows significant levels of concentration across export destinations. To shed light on this observation, this research analyzes trade policy barriers in Eurasia, East Asia and the Pacific, and the European Union. Using the most recent data from sources including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the World Bank including the Overall Trade Restrictiveness Indices, the Services Trade Restrictions Database, and the Temporary Trade Barriers Database the role of tariffs, non-tariff measures, temporary trade barriers, trade agreements, and trade barriers in services are explored to explain the lack of diversification by destination. Several conclusions can be drawn from the analysis. First, China, Korea, and Japan, as well as the European Union, impose high levels of protection on products of animal origin, which may explain the lack of Eurasian export diversification toward the East Asia and the Pacific and the European Union regions. It also highlights the potential benefits of diversifying the structure of production in Eurasia toward more sophisticated and technologically intensive goods. Second, the East Asia and the Pacific region (especially China) appears to be more protectionist than the European Union, suggesting a greater challenge for Eurasian countries in diversifying exports to the destination. And third, few or no regional trade agreements exist between Eurasian countries and countries in the European Union or East Asia and the Pacific.

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.

2015-06, Cali, Massimiliano, Hollweg, Claire H., Ruppert Bulmer, Elizabeth

Increasing 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.