Person:
Silva, Joana
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Development Economics,
Labor Economics,
Social Protection,
Human Development,
International Trade
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Latin America and Caribbean
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Joana Silva is a Senior Economist at the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean. Since joining the World Bank in 2007 as a Young Professional, Joana published several books and articles on a broad set of issues related to economic development, including labor economics, education/skills, social safety nets, poverty, inequality, political economy of economic reforms, firm dynamics and international trade. Her research has been published in professional journals such as the Journal of International Economics, Economics Letters, Review of World Economics and IZA Journal of Labor Policy. Book titles authored or coauthored by Joana include “Sustaining Employment and Wage Gains in Brazil: a Skills and Jobs Agenda”, “Inclusion and Resilience: The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa” and “Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa”. While at the Bank she authored thematic Flagship Reports (e.g. as Task Team Leader for the 2013 MENA Development Report, the Brazil Skills & Jobs report), managed cross-sectorial lending projects and advisory activities (e.g. Task Team Leader for innovative labor and social protection projects), and contributed to a range of analytical studies on design and evaluation of social welfare systems, labor markets, political economy, international integration and investment climate. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Nottingham. Prior to joining the World Bank, she also worked for the Globalization and Economic Policy Research Center at the University of Nottingham and the Inter-American Development Bank. She is fluent in Portuguese, French, English, and Spanish.
Publication Search Results
1 - 9 of 9
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Publication
Exports and Job Training
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05)This paper examines whether export participation matters for job training. The paper draws on longitudinal worker-firm data for Brazilian manufacturing, linked with detailed records on training activity from the main provider. The analysis uses industry-specific exchange rate movements to generate exogenous variation in export status at the firm-level. The findings indicate that export participation tends to increase the share of workers who receive technical upgrading. The results also reveal that technical upgrading has positive returns to trainees within exporting firms. These findings support the hypothesis that exporting requires skill upgrading, and suggest that this is partially achieved by training firms' existing workforce. -
Publication
Trust in Government and Support for Redistribution
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05)In many countries safety nets consist predominantly of universal subsidies on food and fuel. A key question for policy makers willing to shift to targeted safety nets is under what conditions middle-class citizens would be supportive of redistributive programs. Results from a behavioral experiment based on a nationally representative sample in Jordan reveal that increasing transparency in benefit delivery makes middle-class citizens (particularly among the youth and low-trust individuals) more willing to forgo their own welfare to benefit the poor. Moreover, increasing transparency enhances the relative support for cash-based safety nets, which have greater impact on poverty compared with in-kind transfers, but may be perceived as more prone to elite capture. -
Publication
Cash Transfers and Formal Labor Markets: Evidence from Brazil
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09)Cash transfer programs have expanded widely in developing countries and have been credited for sizable reductions in poverty. However, their potential disincentive effects on beneficiaries’ labor supply have spurred a heated policy debate. This paper studies the impact of a large-scale program Bolsa Familia in Brazil on local labor markets in a context where such concerns could be particularly strong: eligibility is means-tested and the paper focuses on the formal labor market, where earnings are more easily verifiable. Yet, the analysis finds that an expansion of Bolsa Familia increased local formal employment, using variation in the size of the reform across municipalities. The evidence is consistent with multiplier effects of cash transfers in the local economy, which dominate potential negative effects on formal labor supply among beneficiaries. -
Publication
International Competition, Returns to Skill, and Labor Market Adjustment
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03)Does increased import competition lead to higher returns to skill within an industry and, therefore, to greater incentives for skill acquisition? Does it also induce skill upgrading by the industry’s existing workforce? To answer these questions, this paper follows individual workers across skills/occupations, firms, and industries using a longitudinal matched employer-employee data set covering all workers and firms in Portugal over 1986-2000. To identify the effects of international competition the analysis uses two exogenous measures of changes in international competition at the industry level. The first is a quasi-natural experiment based on the strong appreciation of the Portuguese currency during 1989-1992 and preexisting differences in trade exposure across industries in a differences-in-differences estimation. The second is source-weighted real exchange rates defined at the industry level. Based on both empirical strategies, and two definitions of skill, the paper shows that international competition increases returns to skill and induces skill/occupation upgrading within industries. -
Publication
Export Destinations and Input Prices
(American Economic Association, 2018-02)This paper examines the relationship between the destination of exports and the input prices paid by firms, using detailed customs and firm-product-level data from Portugal. Both ordinary least squares regressions and an instrumental-variable strategy using exchange-rate movements (interacted with indicators for initial exports) as a source of variation in destinations indicate that exporting to richer countries leads firms to pay higher prices for inputs, other things equal. The results are supportive of what we call the income-based quality-choice channel: selling to richer destinations leads firms to raise the average quality of goods they produce and to purchase higher-quality inputs. -
Publication
Sustaining Employment and Wage Gains in Brazil: A Skills and Jobs Agenda
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015-10-15)In the past 15 years, employment, labor market participation, and wages have grown significantly in Brazil. Improved labor market outcomes have been the main drivers of reductions in poverty and inequality. But job creation is already slowing. Continued progress in employment and labor earnings will depend on the country’s ability to achieve a first critical goal: raising labor productivity. Continued improvements in the livelihoods of the poor will depend on the country’s ability to achieve a second critical goal: connecting the poor to better, more productive jobs. Sustaining Employment and Wage Gains in Brazil: A Skills and Jobs Agenda analyzes Brazil’s labor markets and identifies the key challenges involved in sustaining job creation, wage growth, and poverty reduction. The book discusses reforms of program design and implementation in the policy areas of skills development, unemployment insurance and other labor market regulations, active labor market programs, and productive inclusion programs. The report reviews existing interventions in these four policy areas and proposes an agenda of incremental policy changes that could more effectively support the two critical goals. It also describes specific opportunities in each policy area to better coordinate programs with private sector demands and across policies, while also adapting them to improve the results for the urban and rural poor. An essential first step will be to strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems to measure results by tracking the effects of programs on labor market outcomes and using that information to inform program expansion. -
Publication
Wage Inequality in Latin America: Understanding the Past to Prepare for the Future
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018)What caused the decline in wage inequality of the 2000s in Latin America? Looking to the future, will the current economic slowdown be regressive? Wage Inequality in Latin America: Understanding the Past to Prepare for the Future addresses these two questions by reviewing relevant literature and providing new evidence on what we know from the conceptual, empirical, and policy perspectives. The answer to the first question can be broken down into several parts, although the bottom line is that the changes in wage inequality resulted from a combination of three forces: (a) education expansion and its effect on falling returns to skill (the supply-side story); (b) shifts in aggregate domestic demand; and (c) exchange rate appreciation from the commodity boom and the associated shift to the nontradable sector that changed interfirm wage differences. Other forces had a non-negligible but secondary role in some countries, while they were not present in others. These include the rapid increase of the minimum wage and a rapid trend toward formalization of employment, which played a supporting role but only during the boom. Understanding the forces behind recent trends also helps to shed light on the second question. The analysis in this volume suggests that the economic slowdown is putting the brakes on the reduction of inequality in Latin America and will likely continue to do so—but it might not actually reverse the region’s movement toward less wage inequality. -
Publication
Employment in Crisis: The Path to Better Jobs in a Post-COVID-19 Latin America
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-06-17)A region known for its volatility, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has suffered severe economic and social setbacks from crises—including the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises have taken their toll on careers, wage growth, and productivity. Employment in Crisis: The Path to Better Jobs in a Post-COVID-19 Latin America provides new evidence on the effects of crises on the region’s workers and firms and suggests several policy responses that can bolster long-term and inclusive economic growth. This report has three key findings. First, crises lead to persistent employment losses and accelerate structural changes away from the formal sector. This change occurs more through reductions in the creation of formal jobs than through job destruction. Second, some workers recover from crises, while others are permanently scarred by them. Low-skilled workers can suffer up to a decade of lower earnings caused by crises, while high-skilled workers rebound fast, exacerbating the LAC region’s high level of inequality. Formal workers suffer smaller employment and wage losses in localities with higher rates of informality. And the reduced job flows caused by crises decrease welfare, but workers in localities with more job opportunities, whether formal or informal, bounce back better. Third, crises’ cleansing effects can increase efficiency and productivity, but these effects are dampened by the LAC region’s less competitive market structure. Rather than becoming more agile and productive during economic downturns, protected sectors and firms gain market share and crowd out others, trapping valuable resources. This report proposes a three-pronged mix of policies to improve the LAC region’s responses to crises: • Create a more stable macroeconomic environment to smooth the impacts of crises, including automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and short-term compensation programs; • Increase the capacity of social protection and labor programs to respond to crises and coalesce these programs into systems that complement income support with reemployment assistance and reskilling opportunities; and • Tackle structural issues, including the lack of product market competition and the spatial dimension behind poor labor market adjustment—a “good jobs and good firms” agenda. -
Publication
Twenty Years of Wage Inequality in Latin America
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09)This paper documents an inverse U-shape in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since 1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995 and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, the 90/10 log hourly earnings ratio decreased by 26 percent. The decline since 2002 was characterized by rising wages across the board, but especially among those at the bottom of the wage distribution in each country. Triggered by a rapid expansion of educational attainment, the wages of college and high school graduates fell relative to those with primary education. The premium for labor market experience also fell significantly. But the compression of wages was not entirely driven by changes in the wage structure across skill groups. Two-thirds of the decline in the variance of wages took place within skill groups. Changes in the sectoral, occupational, and formal-informal composition of jobs matter for the process of reduction in inequality, but do not fully account for the fall in within-skill variance. Evidence using longitudinal matched employer-employee administrative data suggests that an important driver was falling wage dispersion across firms.