Person:
Posadas, Josefina
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Labor economics,
Social protection,
Poverty,
Gender,
Development
Degrees
Departments
Global Practice on Social Protection and Labor, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Josefina Posadas is a Senior Economist in the Social Protection and Labor Global Practice of The World Bank Group. Her area of expertise is labor economics, and since joining the World Bank in 2008 she has worked on issues related to labor markets, entrepreneurship, gender equality, and poverty. Between 1996 and 2002, she worked at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina where she reached the position of Associate Professor in 1999. During those years, Josefina also advised different government offices of Argentina, both at the local and at the national level, on employment, trade, and fiscal federalism matters; and taught several classes in Master programs in the UNLP and the Torcuato Di Tella University. She holds a PhD in economics from Boston University and a Master in Economics from the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 11
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Publication
Georgia at Work: Assessing the Jobs Landscape
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018)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. -
Publication
Grandparents as Child Care Providers : Factors to Consider When Designing Child Care Policies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-12)Formal child care services can expand women's economic opportunities and promote equity through early childhood development. However, academics and policy makers often overlook the role of relatives as child care providers. This note discusses how grandparent-provided child care can be factored into child care policies in the context of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, omitting the role of relatives when estimating costs and benefits of child care programs can give biased and incomplete results that might even reverse certain programs. The focus of this note is on the opportunity cost of relatives particularly grandparents who care for children. Not just governments spend on child care programs grandparents spend considerable time caring for grandchildren. Depending on their labor market status and work history, grandparents' opportunity cost could be high or low; governments should factor in such costs when evaluating programs. The Netherlands and the United Kingdom are experimenting with policies that formally support grandparent-provided child care. -
Publication
Kyrgyz Republic: Social Sectors at a Glance
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08)Traditional benchmarks to assess performance rely on unconditional rankings or regional averages. This paper uses a recently developed methodology based on quantile regressions and initial conditions to propose alternative benchmarks for social sectors in Kyrgyz Republic. Covering a wide set of indicators, the analysis reveals mixed results for Kyrgyz Republic. The country has made important strides in many social areas, with outstanding results in reducing child mortality and undernourishment. However, other areas are still key challenges and demand further attention and resources, as evidenced by the underachievement in maternal mortality, educational performance, and increasing informality in labor markets. -
Publication
A Decade of Declining Earnings Inequality in the Russian Federation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08)Wage inequality decreased significantly in the Russian Federation over the 2000s. The economic expansion experienced throughout the decade led to an improvement in social indicators, with a large reduction in poverty rates and an increase in higher education. In this context, wage inequality showed a sharp decline, with the Gini index on labor income decreasing by 18 percent between 2002 and 2012. Using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, this paper documents the reduction in wage inequality and explores potential factors behind the trend. The analysis uses a decomposition technique proposed by Fortin, Lemieux, and Firpo (2011) to disentangle the main drivers behind changes in the wage distribution. The results suggest that wage structure effects are more important than composition effects for explaining changes in wage inequality. Institutional factors, such as minimum wage policies and changes in the returns to employment in different sectors and types of firms as well as the reduction of the skill premium, emerge as the most relevant factors for explaining changes in the wage structure. -
Publication
Gender Gap in Pay in the Russian Federation: Twenty Years Later, Still a Concern
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08)This paper decomposes the gender gap in pay in the Russian Federation along the earnings distribution for the period 1996–2011. The analysis uses a reweighted, recentered influence function decomposition that allows estimating the contribution of each covariate on the wage structure and composition effects along the earnings distribution. The paper finds that women are in flat career paths compared with men; the importance of observable characteristics that proxy human capital in the gender pay gap decrease along the earnings distribution; and if women’s pay took into account their educational degrees as much as men’s, the gender pay gap would disappear or even reverse at the top of the earnings distribution. The results suggest that women at the bottom of the earnings distribution should be helped to increase their labor market skills, and women at the top of the distribution should be helped to break the glass ceiling and be remunerated for their skills to the same extent as men. -
Publication
Activation for Poverty Reduction: Realizing the Potential of Armenia’s Social Safety Nets
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-09)Since the peak of the economic crisis, poverty reduction in Armenia has made limited progress, with poverty rates moving from 34.1 percent in 2009 to 32 percent in 2013. This slow pace has been mirrored by the limited progress of the labor market (LM), particularly in terms of job-creation. In 2013, about 36 percent of people worked in the agricultural sector, and about half of all workers earned wages through informal jobs. These conditions highlight the need to have a robust social protection (SP) system that not only offers adequate protection to people living in poverty but can also serve as a tool to increase the quality of human capital, which in turn can help improve their economic opportunities. The government of Armenia (GoA) has shown a clear interest in building its infrastructure to deliver SP services through integrated social service centers as a means to better harness its investment in SP. Its vision is to ultimately implement an integrated social policy that personalizes interventions and tries to address multiple constraints that people face when trying to escape poverty— not only through the provision of cash benefits. The objective of this policy note is twofold. First, it provides a diagnostic of the SP system in order to identify the key issues that could be addressed to enhance its effectiveness and efficiency to achieve greater poverty reduction. Second, the note outlines a set of options—policies and reforms—for the GoA to consider as it continues to strengthen its poverty-reduction strategy. It is important to note that the focus of the report is on social assistance (SA) and LM policies for vulnerable groups. Other key aspects of SP—such as pensions, labor regulations, or the functioning of the LM as a whole—are not addressed in this report, and they have been the subject of extensive analysis elsewhere. -
Publication
Financial Incentives, Fertility, and Son Preference in Armenia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)Armenia experienced dramatic demographic changes in the past three decades: the share of adults age 65 and over nearly doubled, the total fertility rate reduced by more than 30 percent, and the male-to-female sex ratio at birth increased to one of the world’s highest. Like other middle-income countries concerned with the implications of an aging population for long-term growth and fiscal sustainability, Armenia introduced financial incentives to promote fertility. This paper estimates the effect of the 2009 reform of the universal Childbirth Benefit Program, which increased the amounts of lump sum transfers conditional on birth. The analysis relies on a quasi-experimental strategy exploiting the timing of the policy change and eligibility rule—women get a larger transfer for third and higher-order births. The findings show that the annual probability of an additional birth among women with at least two other children increased between 1.4 and 1.6 percentage points in the five years following the policy change. These effects are equivalent to 58 and 64 percent of the pre-reform birth probability for women who had at least two children. Given the previously demonstrated relationship between fertility level and sex ratio in societies with strong son preference, the reform may potentially alleviate the sex imbalance without directly targeting it. Parents who already have at least one son and are less likely to engage in sex selection and more likely to have additional births; however, the findings do not indicate a significant increase in the likelihood of having daughters. -
Publication
A Checklist to Avoid Pilot Failures : Lessons from a Set of Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiatives
(Taylor and Francis, 2014-10-09)Pilot programs have gained significance in donor-supported development interventions because of the growing emphasis on measuring impact. The Results-based initiatives (RBI) were conceived as pioneering pilots expected to acquire rigorous evidence on effective interventions to foster women’s economic empowerment. However, they fell short of providing clear or generalizable conclusions on women’s economic empowerment due to design and implementation problems. The RBI nevertheless offer important lessons on common traps in pilot design and implementation. This article synthesizes 10 lessons from the RBI as a checklist to avoid pilot failure, intended for practitioners in any area of development. -
Publication
Continuous Improvement: Strengthening Georgia's Targeted Social Assistance Program
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-08-04)The Targeted Social Assistance Program of Georgia is a last resort social program that is considered a best practice among proxy-means-tested (PMT) programs. It achieves high targeting accuracy for a relatively high level poverty incidence. In 2013, the Government of Georgia embarked in the revision of the program to ensure its continuous effectiveness and to revise some of the parameters of the eligibility formula that could be subject to manipulation. In particular, the government was concerned about the subjective evaluation of social agents and about concealable goods. This report assesses the technical work and the policy actions taken by the Georgian government during the last two years. In this way, it covers the full cycle of the reform of a social assistance program, from establishing the objectives to the design of compensation measures to minimize the number of newly ineligible beneficiaries. In particular, it describes the revision of the PMT formula, the introduction of a scheme of benefits that decreases with the score and an associated program for children, the pre-testing of new formula, and the design of compensation measures. The report also includes a chapter with specific recommendations for Georgia to improve the system of social protection and labor. -
Publication
Measuring Gender Equality
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-04-18)Gender equality is a core development objective in its own right and also smart development policy and business practice. No society can develop sustainably without giving men and women equal power to shape their own lives and contribute to their families, communities, and countries. And yet, critical gender gaps continue to exist in all countries and across multiple dimensions. The gender module of the World Bank’s ADePT software platform produces a comprehensive set of tables and graphs using household surveys to help diagnose and analyze the prevailing gender inequalities at the country level and over time. This book provides a step-by-step guide to the use of the ADePT software and an introduction to its basic economic concepts and econometric methods. The module is organized around the framework proposed by the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. It covers gender differences in outcomes in three primary dimensions of gender equality: human capital (or endowments), economic opportunities, and voice and agency. Particular focus is given to the analysis and decomposition techniques that allow for further exploring of gender gaps in economic opportunities.