Person:
Makovec, Mattia

Last updated: October 30, 2024

Biography

Mattia Makovec is a senior economist in the Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice, Latin America and the Caribbean unit, at the World Bank. He has also been leading operations, analytic activities, and policy dialogue on jobs, social protection, and migration in the Europe and Central Asia region. Previously, he worked at the World Bank Office in Jakarta (Indonesia) and held positions at Essex University, at the University of Chile, and at the Ministry of Labor in Chile. Mattia has a doctorate in economics from Bocconi University in Milan and a master’s degree in economics from University College London.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

The Journey Ahead: Supporting Successful Migration in Europe and Central Asia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-31) Bossavie, Laurent; Garrote Sánchez, Daniel; Makovec, Mattia
The Journey Ahead: Supporting Successful Migration in Europe and Central Asia provides an in-depth analysis of international migration in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and the implications for policy making. By identifying challenges and opportunities associated with migration in the region, it aims to inform a more nuanced, evidencebased debate on the costs and benefits of cross-border mobility. Using data-driven insights and new analysis, the report shows that migration has been an engine of prosperity and has helped address some of ECA’s demographic and socioeconomic disparities. Yet, migration’s full economic potential remains untapped. The report identifies multiple barriers keeping migration from achieving its full potential. Crucially, it argues that policies in both origin and destination countries can help maximize the development impacts of migration and effectively manage the economic, social, and political costs. Drawing from a wide range of literature, country experiences, and novel analysis, The Journey Ahead presents actionable policy options to enhance the benefits of migration for destination and origin countries and migrants themselves. Some measures can be taken unilaterally by countries, whereas others require close bilateral or regional coordination. The recommendations are tailored to different types of migration— forced displacement as well as high-skilled and low-skilled economic migration—and from the perspectives of both sending and receiving countries. This report serves as a comprehensive resource for governments, development partners, and other stakeholders throughout Europe and Central Asia, where the richness and diversity of migration experiences provide valuable insights for policy makers in other regions of the world.
Corruption as a Push and Pull Factor of Migration Flows: Evidence from European Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-09-14) Bernini, Andrea; Bossavie, Laurent; Garrote Sanchez, Daniel; Makovec, Mattia; Garrote Sánchez, Daniel
Conclusive evidence on the relationship between corruption and migration has remained scant in the literature to date. Using data from 2008 to 2018 on bilateral migration flows across European Union and European Free Trade Association countries and four measures of corruption, this paper shows that corruption acts as both a push factor and a pull factor for migration patterns. Based on a gravity model, a one-unit increase in the corruption level in the origin country is associated with a 11 percent increase in out-migration. The same one-unit increase in the destination country is associated with a 10 percent decline in in-migration.
Assessing the Effectiveness of Social Protection Measures in Mitigating COVID-19-Related Income Shocks in the European Union
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-08-16) Gasior, Katrin; Jara, H. Xavier; Makovec, Mattia
By means of counterfactual simulation methods, this paper quantifies the role of tax–benefit policies in mitigating the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic to household income in the European Union. The tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union EUROMOD is used to decompose changes in the income distribution into the effects of: (i) earnings losses due to COVID-19, (ii) automatic stabilizers, (iii) monetary compensation schemes introduced during the pandemic; and (iv) COVID-19-specific reforms to taxes and benefits implemented by European Union governments. The results show a great deal of heterogeneity between countries in terms of earnings losses and the effect of tax-benefit policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. In most countries, the largest contribution to cushioning the economic shock of the pandemic comes from monetary compensation schemes. Automatic stabilizers also play a role, mainly through the effects of social insurance contributions, taxes, and unemployment insurance benefits. Tax-benefit systems cushioned incomes to a large extent even among those most severely affected by the shock to earnings, with an important role for monetary compensation schemes, but also a larger stabilizing effect of unemployment insurance. Among automatic stabilizers, social assistance benefits played an important role in cushioning the income shock for the poorest quintiles among the most severely affected, but only in selected countries.
Skilled Migration: A Sign of Europe's Divide or Integration?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-09) Bossavie, Laurent; Garrote-Sánchez, Daniel; Makovec, Mattia; Özden, Çağlar
Skilled Migration: A Sign of Europe’s Divide or Integration? examines the trends, determinants, and impacts of migration of high-skilled workers within the European Union in the past two decades. High-skilled migration, whether internal or international, is largely a symptom rather than a cause of the gaps in labor market and educational opportunities, productivity, welfare, and the quality of institutions across the regions. Free movement within the European Union is an incentive for workers and firms to take advantage of these gaps by moving from low- to high-productivity sectors and regions. This process, however, results in winners and losers depending on the extent of the complementarity and substitutability between migrants and natives and on the capacity of the sending regions to realize benefits from return or circular migration and other knowledge spillovers. This study assesses the economic benefits and the costs of skilled migration in the short and long runs, emphasizing the potential implications of a large outflow of highly qualified workers on the economies of the originating regions. This book uses empirical analysis to present recommendations for labor market and education policies and identify effective ways to address the various costs that migration induces among different skill groups within regions that send migrants and those that receive migrants. These methods must also improve cross-country coordination to more effectively unlock the overall benefits of migration.
Occupational Hazards: Migrants and the Economic and Health Risks of COVID-19 in Western Europe
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12) Bossavie, Laurent; Garrote Sanchez, Daniel; Makovec, Mattia; Ozden, Caglar; Garrote Sánchez, Daniel
This paper investigates the economic and health risks arising from the COVID-19 pandemic for migrant workers in the European Union. It first assesses migrants’ economic and health vulnerabilities using ex ante measures based on both supply and demand shocks. The analysis finds that immigrants were more vulnerable than native-born workers to both income- and health-related risks, and that this greater exposure stems from the occupations in which migrant workers are concentrated. Migrants work to a greater degree than native-born citizens in occupations that are less amenable to teleworking arrangements, and in economic sectors that experienced greater reductions in demand during the pandemic. This has led to an increase in both their income and employment risks. The paper shows that individual characteristics, such as educational attainment, age, and geographical location, fail to explain the native-migrant gap in exposure to economic and health risks posed by the pandemic. Limited language ability, the concentration of migrants in jobs with labor shortages among native-born workers, and a reliance on immigrant networks to find jobs all appear to play significant roles in migrants’ exposure to pandemic-related risks. Finally, the paper finds that actual job losses in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, are highly correlated with ex-ante vulnerabilities: immigrant workers experienced significantly higher rates of job losses, which partly originates from their greater concentration in non-teleworkable jobs. Ex-ante vulnerabilities, however, only explain part of the migrant-native gap in job losses that followed the pandemic and being an immigrant still imposes additional risks.
Do Immigrants Shield the Locals? Exposure to COVID-Related Risks in the European Union
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Bossavie, Laurent; Garrote Sánchez, Daniel; Makovec, Mattia; Ozden, Caglar
This paper investigates the relationship between immigration and the exposure of native workers to the health and labor-market risks arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Using various measures of occupational risks based on European Union labor force survey data, the paper finds that immigrant workers, especially those from lower-income member countries in Eastern Europe or from outside the EU, face greater exposure than their native-born peers to both income and health-shocks related to COVID-19. The paper also shows that native workers living in regions with a higher concentration of immigrants are less exposed to some of the income and health risks associated with the pandemic. To assess whether this relationship is causal, a Bartik-type shift-share instrument is used to control for potential bias and unobservable factors that would lead migrants to self-select into more vulnerable occupations across regions. The results show that the presence of immigrant workers has a causal effect in reducing the exposure of native workers to various risks by enabling the native-born workers to move into jobs that could be undertaken from the safety of their homes or with lower face-to-face interactions. The effects on the native-born population are more pronounced for high-skilled workers than for low-skilled workers, and for women than for men. The paper does not find a significant effect of immigration on wages and employment — indicating that the effects are mostly driven by a reallocation of natives from less safe jobs to safer jobs.
The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Destruction, Employment and Informality
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02) Acar, Aysenur; Bossavie, Laurent; Makovec, Mattia
This paper studies the effects of a large increase in the minimum wage on the destruction of formal firms, and the associated impacts on employment, wages, and informality in a developing economy. It examines the ramifications of a 33 percent nominal increase in the minimum wage that took effect in Turkey in 2016. It utilizes an exceptionally rich, employer-employee-linked dataset that shows the wage distribution within firms, which enables to measure the degree of firms’ minimum-wage exposure, and to estimate causal effects using a difference-in-differences approach. The paper shows that raising the minimum wage substantially increased the destruction of formal firms, leading to a fall in the number of formal firms in the economy. Effects are concentrated among small firms with low levels of productivity; highly productive firms are unaffected. The minimum-wage increase had negative effects on formal employment that largely originated through firm destruction, rather than through cuts in formal employment within surviving firms. Among workers who lost jobs in firms that ultimately exited, only a minority had obtained new employment a year later. The minimum-wage increase was accompanied by a rise in inactivity and unemployment, rather than growth of informal employment, suggesting that workers who lost formal employment mostly failed to find new jobs one year after the minimum wage hike, even informally. While the higher minimum wage had large, positive effects on the wages of formally employed workers, limited effects on the wages of informal workers are reported.
Vertical and Horizontal Redistribution: The Cases of Western and Eastern Europe
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11) Krolage, Carla; Bussolo, Maurizio; Makovec, Mattia; Peichl, Andreas; Stockli, Marc; Torre, Ivan; Wittneben, Christian; Torre, Iván
European countries have the world's most redistributive tax and transfer systems. Although they have been well equipped to deal with vertical inequality -- that is, fostering redistribution from the rich to the poor -- less is known about their performance in dealing with horizontal inequality, that is, in redistributing among socioeconomic groups. In a context where individuals may not only care about vertical redistribution, but also about the economic situation of the specific groups to which they belong, the horizontal dimension of redistribution becomes politically salient and can be a source of social tensions. This paper analyzes the performance of the 28 EU countries on redistribution across (i) age groups, (ii) occupational groups, and (iii) household types over 2007–2014 using counterfactual simulation techniques. The analysis finds a great degree of heterogeneity across countries: changes in the tax and transfer system have particularly hit the young and losers of occupational change in Eastern European countries, while households with greater economic security have benefited from these changes. The findings suggest that horizontal inequality is a dimension that policy makers should take into account when reforming tax and transfer systems.
Georgia at Work: Assessing the Jobs Landscape
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018) Makovec, Mattia; Posadas, Josefina; Jaef, Roberto Fattal; Gruen, Carola; Ajwad, Mohamed Ihsan
Georgia’s reforms over the last two decades have paved the way for the country’s economic transformation by the creation of better jobs and substantial poverty reduction. Despite these positive developments, some important structural challenges persist in relation to jobs. Growth has not created sufficient jobs in Georgia, especially not enough inclusive and high-productivity jobs. This report analyses the main economic forces driving job creation in Georgia, and attempts to answer four questions. First, Chapter 1 investigates whether the enabling environment is conducive to good job outcomes? Second, Chapter 2 investigates how formal sector job creators doing? Third, Chapter 3 investigates how does the Georgian workforce measure up to the needs of employers? Finally, Chapter 4 recommends a set of policy options that can improve jobs outcomes.
From Transition to EU Accession : The Bulgarian Labor Market during the 1990s
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-05) Garibaldi, Pietro; Makovec, Mattia; Stoyanova, Gabriella
This report studies the Bulgarian labor market with a view to understand the interactions between the performance of the Bulgarian economy and the functioning of its labor market. The report assesses also the position of Bulgaria vis-a-vis compliance with the "acquis communautaire," and provides a set of key policy recommendations that may enhance job creation potential in years to come. In the aftermath of a steep adjustment process, the Bulgarian labor market resembles a sclerotic market, not dissimilar from the worst performing European markets. Nevertheless, the existing labor market policies and institutions, with the exception of excessively high payroll taxes and a somewhat strict employment protection legislation, are not necessarily synonymous of labor market rigidity: unemployment support schemes are modest, the minimum wage is not high, and industrial relations systems do not appear to prevent an efficient wage dispersion across sectors. Thus, the poor performance of Bulgaria is likely to be the result of a chronic inability to restructure its old sector and to tackle fundamental structural problems. In terms of compliance with the "acquis communautaire," Bulgaria's legislation appears aligned with most of the European Union requirements in the labor area. However, the standardization of working conditions requires substantial investments and a strengthening of administrative capacity to implement EU legislation.