Posadas, Josefina

Person:
Posadas, Josefina

Global Practice on Social Protection and Labor, The World Bank

Author Name Variants

Posadas, Josefina

Fields of Specialization

Labor economics, Social protection, Poverty, Gender, Development

Departments

Global Practice on Social Protection and Labor, The World Bank

Last updated:October 2, 2025

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.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/10986/38902

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing1 - 10 of 13

(In)Formalizing Jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean: Taxes, Benefits, and Labor Market Incentives
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-10-02) Fietz, Katharina; Joubert, Clement; Ñopo, Hugo; Ocampo, Alberto J.; Packard, Truman; Posadas, Josefina; Chamussy, Lourdes Rodriguez
Designing and administering effective national social protection systems have long been a challenge for policy makers worldwide. For decades, the principal objection to social protection policies was that they encouraged sloth. Today, voters and governments are less worried that taxes and social protections are unintentionally creating poverty traps than that they are encouraging workers to be static rather than dynamic or leading employers to be averse to using new technologies that can scale economic activity. "(In)Formalizing Jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean: Taxes, Benefits, and Labor Market Incentives" deepens the understanding of the incentives to informalize or formalize work in the labor markets in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), focusing on the interplay among personal income taxation, social protection, and labor market policies and how they all combine to shape firms’ and workers’ incentives to (in)formalize jobs. This book introduces a new conceptual framework to guide the analysis and inference—one that centers on individual workers’ decisions and in light of the value they ascribe to present and future benefits; their bargaining power with employers, which is determined by labor market competitiveness; and the government’s ability to detect and sanction evasion. This report provides a detailed mapping of tax, benefits, and contracting rules, which supports empirical analysis to identify and quantify incentives for (in)formal employment and to simulate how reforms to current policies and programs would affect these incentives. This analysis forms the basis for policy reform recommendations that would substantially improve incentives, so that more workers and firms in the LAC region choose to formalize employment and participate in personal income tax and social protection systems.
Why Look at Tasks When Designing Skills Policy for the Green Transition? A Methodological Note on How to Identify Green Occupations and the Skills They Require
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-17) Granata, Julia; Posadas, Josefina
The coexistence of several definitions of green jobs and measurement instruments gives room for mismatches between those concepts and their application to research questions. This paper first presents an organizing framework for the existing definitions, measurement instruments, and policy frameworks. It then delves into discussing two appropriate approaches for identifying green occupations to guide skills development policy: the task-content and the skills approaches. In the process, it introduces a novel methodology with a dictionary of green terms for identifying green tasks and occupations. This methodology, utilizing text analysis, demonstrates superior performance compared to the well-known O*NET Green Economic Project classification, particularly for developing countries. Lastly, the paper applies this methodology to Indonesia, a middle-income country, and utilizes various data sources to showcase the utility of the dictionary and text analysis exercise.
Financial Incentives, Fertility, and Son Preference in Armenia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Pinto, Maria Florencia; Posadas, Josefina; Shapira, Gil
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.
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.
Measuring Gender Equality
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-04-18) Sajaia, Zurab; Posadas, Josefina; Paci, Pierella; Lokshin, Michael
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.
Continuous Improvement: Strengthening Georgia's Targeted Social Assistance Program
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-08-04) Baum, Tinatin; Mshvidobadze, Anastasia; Posadas, Josefina
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.
Gender Gap in Pay in the Russian Federation: Twenty Years Later, Still a Concern
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08) Atencio, Andrea; Posadas, Josefina
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.
A Checklist to Avoid Pilot Failures : Lessons from a Set of Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiatives
(Taylor and Francis, 2014-10-09) Johansson de Silva, Sara; Paci, Pierella; Posadas, Josefina
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.
A Decade of Declining Earnings Inequality in the Russian Federation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08) Calvo, Paula Andrea; Lopez-Calva, Luis-Felipe; Posadas, Josefina
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.
Kyrgyz Republic: Social Sectors at a Glance
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08) Calvo, Paula; Azevedo, Joao Pedro; Nguyen, Minh; Posadas, Josefina
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.