Person:
Rigolini, Jamele

Latin America and Caribbean
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Social Development, Sustainable Development
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Latin America and Caribbean
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Last updated July 5, 2023
Biography
Jamele Rigolini has been the World Bank Program Leader for Human Development and Poverty for Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. His areas of expertise include social protection, human development, labor markets, poverty, gender and entrepreneurship/innovation policies. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Warwick (UK). He also worked for the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and McKinsey & Co.  At the World Bank, he worked in the East Asia and Pacific region, where he managed lending projects and advisory activities in the areas of labor markets and social protection. He also managed the World Bank’s flagship reports for Latin America and maintained close dialogue with other international organizations, as well as with Latin American academic institutions and think tanks. Jamele Rigolini holds a degree in physics from the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and a Ph.D. in economics from New York University. He has published articles in several economics journals, including the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Letters and World Development.   
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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Informal Employment : Safety Net or Growth Engine?
    ( 2011) Loayza, Norman V. ; Rigolini, Jamele
    Is informal employment a safety net or a growth engine? To address this question, this paper studies the trends and cycles of informal employment. It first presents a theoretical model of long- and short-run behavior of informal labor. Then it analyzes these relationships empirically, using the share of self-employment in the labor force as the proxy for informal employment. In the long run, informality is larger when labor productivity is lower, government services weaker, and business flexibility less prevalent. In the short run, informal employment behaves counter-cyclically, indicating that it acts primarily as a safety net. The degree of counter-cyclicality, however, varies inversely with the size of informal labor itself.
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    Latin America and the Social Contract : Patterns of Social Spending and Taxation
    ( 2009) Breceda, Karla ; Rigolini, Jamele ; Saavedra, Jaime
    This article analyzes the incidence of social spending and taxation by income quintile for seven Latin American countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Absolute levels of social spending in Latin America are fairly flat across income quintiles, a pattern similar to that in the United States and differing from the more progressive pattern of spending in the United Kingdom. The structure of taxation in Latin America is also similar to that of the United States. Because of high income inequality in Latin America and the US, the rich bear of most the burden, whereas the United Kingdom taxes the middle class to a greater extent. The analysis suggests that many Latin American countries are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the rich resist the expansion of the welfare state (because they bear most of its tax burden without receiving commensurate benefits), and their opposition to its expansion in turn maintains long-term inequalities.
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    Informality Traps
    ( 2008) Masatlioglu, Yusufcan ; Rigolini, Jamele
    Despite large deregulation efforts, informal economic activity still represents a large share of GDP in many developing countries. In this paper we look at incentives to reduce informal activity when capitalists in the formal sector regulate entry. We consider a dual economy with a formal sector employing educated workers and an informal sector with unskilled workers. We show that high costs of education make labor migration and profits in the formal sector an increasing function of its size. Therefore, incentives to allow capital to be reallocated to the formal sector increase with the size of the formal economy, and unless the formal sector has reached a "critical mass" countries remain in a highly informal equilibrium. We conclude by reviewing policies that can push countries with large informal economies towards formalization.
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    Development and the Interaction of Enforcement Institutions
    ( 2011) Dhillon, Amrita ; Rigolini, Jamele
    We examine how formal and informal contract enforcing institutions interact in a competitive market with asymmetric information where consumers do not observe quality before purchase. Firm level incentives for producing high quality can be achieved with an informal enforcement mechanism, reputation, the efficacy of which is enhanced by consumers investing in "connectedness;" or with a formal mechanism, legal enforcement, the effectiveness of which can be reduced by means of bribes. We show that formal and informal enforcement mechanisms do not necessarily substitute each other: while high levels of judicial efficiency decrease consumers' incentives to connect, higher consumers' connectedness leads to higher levels of judicial efficiency. We then look at how the equilibrium institutional mix evolves with the level of development. In doing so we show the presence of a new, physical, channel that can affect institutions--i.e., the frequency of bad productivity shocks that, in less developed settings, can impact on firms' incentives to cheat.