Publication:
Occupational Segregation and Declining Gender Wage Gap: The Case of Georgia

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (1.13 MB)
428 downloads
English Text (74.95 KB)
24 downloads
Date
2018-09
ISSN
Published
2018-09
Author(s)
Khitarishvili, Tamar
Rodriguez-Chamussy, Lourdes
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper examines the role of industrial and occupational segregation in explaining the gender wage gap and its evolution in Georgia between 2004 and 2015. It first documents the declining trends observed in the gender wage gap in Georgia during this period, commenting on some of the possible underlying factors driving such trends. It then presents evidence that employment patterns by industry and occupations are highly concentrated in the country and measures the degree of segregation using the Duncan index. Next, it analyzes if and how much industrial and occupational segregation have contributed to the gender wage gap and its decline by decomposing the gender wage gap into the within-category and between-category components. The results point to existing gender wage gaps within sectors, industries, and occupations being the primary drivers of the wage gap in Georgia, and find a smaller role of gender segregation per se in these categories.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Khitarishvili, Tamar; Rodriguez-Chamussy, Lourdes; Sinha, Nistha. 2018. Occupational Segregation and Declining Gender Wage Gap: The Case of Georgia. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8583. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30428 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Geopolitics and the World Trading System
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Mattoo, Aaditya; Ruta, Michele; Staiger, Robert W.
    Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.
  • Publication
    The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Abalo, Kodzovi; Boehlert, Brent; Bui, Thanh; Burns, Andrew; Castillo, Diego; Chewpreecha, Unnada; Haider, Alexander; Hallegatte, Stephane; Jooste, Charl; McIsaac, Florent; Ruberl, Heather; Smet, Kim; Strzepek, Ken
    Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
  • Publication
    Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05) Foster, Elizabeth; Jolliffe, Dean Mitchell; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lakner, Christoph; Tettah-Baah, Samuel
    Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.
  • Publication
    Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22) Middelanis, Robin; Jafino, Bramka Arga; Hill, Ruth; Nguyen, Minh Cong; Hallegatte, Stephane
    Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.
  • Publication
    From Patriarchy to Policy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Bussolo, Maurizio; Rexer, Jonah M.; Hu, Lynn
    Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    The Economics of the Gender Wage Gap in Armenia
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-04) Rodriguez-Chamussy, Lourdes; Sinha, Nistha; Atencio, Andrea
    In Armenia, the proportion of women among employed workers increased from 45 to 48 percent between 2008 and 2015. This evolution was accompanied by a fall in the gender earnings gap; however, the difference in average wages of men and women is still among the largest in comparison with countries in the Europe and Central Asia region. This study documents the gender wage gap in Armenia through stylized facts and further investigates its sources. The paper finds that the gender wage gap in hourly pay is 20 percent on average. Looking at the different percentiles, the disparity in wages in Armenia in 2015 shows an inverted U-shaped form with a larger differential in wages between men and women in the middle of the distribution. Using a reweighted, re-centered influence function decomposition, the analysis estimates the contribution of each covariate on the wage structure and composition effects along the wage distribution. The decomposition shows that the wage gap in Armenia is mostly driven by the wage structure effect (unexplained component), which accounts for almost all the wage gap in the middle part of the distribution (30th to 55th percentiles) and is even greater at the top, but better endowments of women offset it to some extent. In the bottom part of the distribution however, the composition effect is larger, consistent with lower endowments among women, for example, of skills and human capital.
  • Publication
    When Do Gender Wage Differences Emerge?
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03) Pastore, Francesco; Sattar, Sarosh; Sinha, Nistha; Tiongson, Erwin R.
    Building on recent analyses that find a sizeable overall gender wage gap in Azerbaijan's workforce, this paper uses data on young workers in their early years in the labor market to understand how gender wage gaps evolve over time, if at all. The paper uses a unique database from a survey of young people ages 15–29 years. The analysis provides evidence that new labor market entrants begin with little or no gender differences in earnings, but a wage gap gradually emerges over time closer to the childbearing years. The gender wage gap grows from virtually zero, or even a small, positive gap in favor of women, until age 20 years, to about 20 percent two years later and even more than 30 percent at age 29 years. The gap in labor supply rises from almost zero to about 20 percent during the years from 19 to 22, while the gap in hours worked falls from positive (up to six hours per week more than their male counterparts) to negative (up to five hours per week less) over the same period in the life cycle. When decomposing the gap at different deciles of the wage distribution, it appears that most of it is at the lower and upper ends of the distribution, among young adults and prime-age workers. Selection of women into employment is strong and strongly skill-based: when controlling for sample selection bias, the gender gap becomes positive.
  • Publication
    A Gender (R)evolution in the Making? Expanding Women's Economic Opportunities in Central America : A Decade in Review
    (Washington, DC, 2012-01) World Bank
    A Gender Revolution in the Making was produced by the World Bank as a special report on the dichotomy of the economic participation of women in Central America from 1997-2007. Central America made considerable progress during 1997-2006: stronger economic and political stability, overall positive albeit modest economic growth and improvements in socio-economic outcomes. Nonetheless, the panorama for women in the region, and in particular their ability to work and generate income is mixed. Labor force participation of women in Central America remained unchanged over the decade, with one in every two women of working age still not participating economically. This is lower than the rest of Latin America, a region with the lowest labor force participation in the world, although it has improved significantly in recent years. And yet, women in the region have made major advances in closing the gender earnings gaps and increasing their ability to earn income. Women's contribution to overall income generation in Central America rose significantly over the decade. This report aims to identify the factors behind these three trends. However, stagnant labor force participation rates for women contrasted with narrowing earnings gaps and a greater contribution to overall income apparent in Central America from 1997 to 2006.
  • Publication
    Gender Equality, Poverty and Economic Growth
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-09) Morrison, Andrew; Raju, Dhushyanth; Sinha, Nistha
    This paper reviews empirical findings from economic analyses of the role of gender equality and women's empowerment in reducing poverty and stimulating growth. Going beyond the large literature documenting the impact of female education on a range of development outcomes, the paper presents evidence on the impact of women's access to markets (labor, land, and credit) and women's decision-making power within households on poverty reduction and productivity at the individual and household level. The paper also summarizes evidence from studies examining the relationship between gender equality and poverty reduction and growth at the macro level. Although micro level effects of gender equality on individual productivity and human development outcomes have been well documented and have important ramifications for aggregate economic performance, establishing an empirical relationship between gender equality and poverty reduction and growth at the macro level has proven to be more challenging. The paper concludes by identifying priority areas for future research.
  • Publication
    Why Should We Care about Care?
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-12) Levin, Victoria; Munoz Boudet, Ana Maria; Rosen, Beth Zikronah; Aritomi, Tami; Flanagan, Julianna; Rodriguez-Chamussy, Lourdes
    Despite a slight increase in female labor participation between 2012 and 2013, employment rates in Serbia stood at 40.1 percent for women in 2013, almost 15 percentage points below employment rates for men (at 54.9 percent). International evidence shows that support for childcare and eldercare affects women’s labor market participation. This note examines the care needs of families with children and or elderly household members and the provision of formal care services in Serbia with an emphasis on the availability, price, and quality characteristics. Based on the analysis of an independent mixed-methods dataset collected in the Western Balkans region, this note documents the perceptions and barriers in the use of quality formal care in Serbia. Quality provision of formal eldercare can potentially improve health outcomes for the elderly through prevention, early detection, and consistent maintenance of chronic diseases, which may imply long-term cost savings in the healthcare sector.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Global Economic Prospects, January 2025
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16) World Bank
    Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.
  • Publication
    Media and Messages for Nutrition and Health
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Calleja, Ramon V., Jr.; Mbuya, Nkosinathi V.N.; Morimoto, Tomo; Thitsy, Sophavanh
    The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has experienced rapid and significant economic growth over the past decade. However, poor nutritional outcomes remain a concern. Rates of childhood undernutrition are particularly high in remote, rural, and upland areas. Media have the potential to play an important role in shaping health and nutrition–related behaviors and practices as well as in promoting sociocultural and economic development that might contribute to improved nutritional outcomes. This report presents the results of a media audit (MA) that was conducted to inform the development and production of mass media advocacy and communication strategies and materials with a focus on maternal and child health and nutrition that would reach the most people from the poorest communities in northern Lao PDR. Making more people aware of useful information, essential services and products and influencing them to use these effectively is the ultimate goal of mass media campaigns, and the MA measures the potential effectiveness of media efforts to reach this goal. The effectiveness of communication channels to deliver health and nutrition messages to target beneficiaries to ensure maximum reach and uptake can be viewed in terms of preferences, satisfaction, and trust. Overall, the four most accessed media channels for receiving information among communities in the study areas were village announcements, mobile phones, television, and out-of-home (OOH) media. Of the accessed media channels, the top three most preferred channels were village announcements (40 percent), television (26 percent), and mobile phones (19 percent). In terms of trust, village announcements were the most trusted source of information (64 percent), followed by mobile phones (14 percent) and television (11 percent). Hence of all the media channels, village announcements are the most preferred, have the most satisfied users, and are the most trusted source of information in study communities from four provinces in Lao PDR with some of the highest burden of childhood undernutrition.
  • Publication
    Business Ready 2024
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-03) World Bank
    Business Ready (B-READY) is a new World Bank Group corporate flagship report that evaluates the business and investment climate worldwide. It replaces and improves upon the Doing Business project. B-READY provides a comprehensive data set and description of the factors that strengthen the private sector, not only by advancing the interests of individual firms but also by elevating the interests of workers, consumers, potential new enterprises, and the natural environment. This 2024 report introduces a new analytical framework that benchmarks economies based on three pillars: Regulatory Framework, Public Services, and Operational Efficiency. The analysis centers on 10 topics essential for private sector development that correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm. The report also offers insights into three cross-cutting themes that are relevant for modern economies: digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender. B-READY draws on a robust data collection process that includes specially tailored expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys. The 2024 report, which covers 50 economies, serves as the first in a series that will expand in geographical coverage and refine its methodology over time, supporting reform advocacy, policy guidance, and further analysis and research.
  • Publication
    Women, Business and the Law 2024
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-04) World Bank
    Women, Business and the Law 2024 is the 10th in a series of annual studies measuring the enabling conditions that affect women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies. To present a more complete picture of the global environment that enables women’s socioeconomic participation, this year Women, Business and the Law introduces two new indicators—Safety and Childcare—and presents findings on the implementation gap between laws (de jure) and how they function in practice (de facto). This study presents three indexes: (1) legal frameworks, (2) supportive frameworks (policies, institutions, services, data, budget, and access to justice), and (3) expert opinions on women’s rights in practice in the areas measured. The study’s 10 indicators—Safety, Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Childcare, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension—are structured around the different stages of a woman’s working life. Findings from this new research can inform policy discussions to ensure women’s full and equal participation in the economy. The indicators build evidence of the critical relationship between legal gender equality and women’s employment and entrepreneurship. Data in Women, Business and the Law 2024 are current as of October 1, 2023.
  • Publication
    Economic Recovery
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04-06) Malpass, David; Georgieva, Kristalina; Yellen, Janet
    World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the world facing major challenges, including COVID, climate change, rising poverty and inequality and growing fragility and violence in many countries. He highlighted vaccines, working closely with Gavi, WHO, and UNICEF, the World Bank has conducted over one hundred capacity assessments, many even more before vaccines were available. The World Bank Group worked to achieve a debt service suspension initiative and increased transparency in debt contracts at developing countries. The World Bank Group is finalizing a new climate change action plan, which includes a big step up in financing, building on their record climate financing over the past two years. He noted big challenges to bring all together to achieve GRID: green, resilient, and inclusive development. Janet Yellen, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, mentioned focusing on vulnerable people during the pandemic. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, focused on giving everyone a fair shot during a sustainable recovery. All three commented on the importance of tackling climate change.