Publication: Towards a Regional Strategy to Strengthen the Nurse Workforce of the English-speaking CARICOM : International Legal Instruments, Agreements and Obligations
Loading...
Published
2012-01
ISSN
Date
2013-03-27
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The supply of nurses in the English-Speaking Caribbean is insufficient to meet the demand with growing shortages fuelled by the health needs of a rapidly aging population and tremendous losses of human capital occurring at multiple points in the markets. In defining the scope of commitments of a regional legal agreement, English-Speaking Caribbean Community (ES CARICOM) states will have to ascertain whether states would commit to actions to strengthen the nurse workforce or the health workforce more broadly. While the challenges of strengthening the nurse workforce have been systematically assessed, information about other groups of health professionals remains patchy. In 2008, at the request of the Ministers of Health, the World Bank initiated a stream of work to strengthen the nurse workforce in the English-speaking Caribbean. The study estimated the stock of nurses in the ES CARICOM at approximately 7,800 in 2007 with growing shortages under existing policies at 3,400 in 2007 increasing to 10,700 nurses in 2025 due to the health needs of a rapidly aging population. There are two types of international legal instruments: legally binding instruments or treaties; and non-legally binding instruments.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Kurowski, Christoph; Carpio, Carmen; Vujicic, Marko; Gostin, Lawrence O.; Baytor, Tanya. 2012. Towards a Regional Strategy to Strengthen the Nurse Workforce of the English-speaking CARICOM : International Legal Instruments, Agreements and Obligations. HNP Discussion Paper;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12994 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Towards a Regional Strategy to Strengthen the Nurse Workforce of the English-speaking CARICOM : International Legal Instruments, Agreements and Obligations(World Bank, 2012-01-01)The supply of nurses in the English-Speaking Caribbean is insufficient to meet the demand with growing shortages fuelled by the health needs of a rapidly aging population and tremendous losses of human capital occurring at multiple points in the markets. In defining the scope of commitments of a regional legal agreement, English-Speaking Caribbean Community (ES CARICOM) states will have to ascertain whether states would commit to actions to strengthen the nurse workforce or the health workforce more broadly. While the challenges of strengthening the nurse workforce have been systematically assessed, information about other groups of health professionals remains patchy. In 2008, at the request of the Ministers of Health, the World Bank initiated a stream of work to strengthen the nurse workforce in the English-speaking Caribbean. The study estimated the stock of nurses in the ES CARICOM at approximately 7,800 in 2007 with growing shortages under existing policies at 3,400 in 2007 increasing to 10,700 nurses in 2025 due to the health needs of a rapidly aging population. There are two types of international legal instruments: legally binding instruments or treaties; and non-legally binding instruments.Publication Contemporary Migration to South Africa : A Regional Development Issue(World Bank, 2011-08-23)This book is a call to rethink migration regimes in Southern Africa in ways that are more explicitly developmental and focused on poverty. Current policy debates are devoted almost exclusively to border control and policing; they pay only lip service to local and regional developmental strategies. This volume takes a different approach. Its contributors are scholars who are convinced that empirically based policy making stands a better chance of succeeding than untested preconceptions that risk reproducing recipes that have failed elsewhere. The book is therefore strong on empirics, providing a wealth of original data. It also reframes existing approaches and reexamines secondary data from fresh perspectives. Although the focus remains South Africa, the book reflects South Africa's regional role and draws on data from across the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This book broadens the 'migration' agenda beyond the boundaries of migration studies and migration policy silos. This book is intended to become a resource for a range of audiences in Southern Africa and the continent.Publication Impact of Migration on Economic and Social Development : A Review of Evidence and Emerging Issues(2011-02-01)This paper provides a review of the literature on the development impact of migration and remittances on origin countries and on destination countries in the South. International migration is an ever-growing phenomenon that has important development implications for both sending and receiving countries. For a sending country, migration and the resulting remittances lead to increased incomes and poverty reduction, and improved health and educational outcomes, and promote economic development. Yet these gains might come at substantial social costs to the migrants and their families. Since many developing countries are also large recipients of international migrants, they face challenges of integration of immigrants, job competition between migrant and native workers, and fiscal costs associated with provision of social services to the migrants. This paper also summarizes incipient discussions on the impacts of migration on climate change, democratic values, demographics, national identity, and security. In conclusion, the paper highlights a few policy recommendations calling for better integration of migration in development policies in the South and the North, improving data collection on migration and remittance flows, leveraging remittances for improving access to finance of recipient households and countries, improving recruitment mechanisms, and facilitating international labor mobility through safe and legal channels.Publication Building Equality and Opportunity through Social Guarantees : New Approaches to Public Policy and the Realization of Rights(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009)The book showcases an innovative approach to social policy that the author believes can act to transform the capacity of states to implement policies to enhance equality of opportunity among citizens. The approach is built around the framework of social guarantees and emphasizes multiple dimensions in the delivery of services and the realization of rights. The social guarantees approach converts abstract rights into defined standards that can be used as a framework for making public policy accountable to citizens. It emphasizes that effective realization of social rights requires attention not just to dimensions of access, but also to elements of quality, financial protection, and the availability of mechanisms of redress. Social guarantees strengthen citizenship through an emphasis on the policy mechanisms and democratic processes needed to define and support such standards. Rigorous analysis of available public resources and of institutions, programmatic approaches, and legal frameworks is essential to underpin the provision of social guarantees and to ensure that the set standards can be delivered to all.Publication Human Rights and Climate Change : A Review of the International Legal Dimensions(World Bank, 2011-03-17)The study includes a conceptual overview of the link between climate impacts and human rights, focused on the relevant legal obligations underpinning the international law frameworks governing both human rights and climate change. As such it makes a significant contribution to the global debate on climate change and human rights by offering a comprehensive analysis of the international legal dimensions of this intersection. The study helps advance an understanding of what is meant, in legal and policy terms, by the human rights impacts of climate change through examples of specific substantive rights. It gives a legal and theoretic perspective on the connection between human rights and climate change along three dimensions: first, human rights may affect the enjoyment of human rights. Second, measures to address human rights may impact the realization of rights and third, that human rights have potential relevance to policy and operational responses to climate change, and may promote resilience to climate change, including in developing countries in a way that may help sustainable development. This study effectively consolidates knowledge from the fields of international human rights law, international law governing climate change and international environmental law, building on the existing work of the United Nation (UN) office of the high commissioner on human rights, the UN human rights council and the international council on human rights policy. Although it maintains a legal focus, the study has benefited from the input of a host of international experts from other disciplines as well.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Do Bilateral Labor Agreements Increase Migration? Global Evidence from 1960 to 2020(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-17)This paper estimates the impact of bilateral labor arrangements on migration between two countries. It uses comprehensive data on bilateral migration and bilateral labor agreements across all country pairs for each decade from 1960 to 2020, and employs an empirical specification with a rich set of fixed effects. In the preferred and most stringent specification, the findings show that signing a bilateral labor agreement increases migration from an origin country to a destination country by 76 percent (0.57 log points) in the decade of signing. The effect persists for up to three decades. The impacts are higher for corridors without a pre-existing regular flow and for destinations in the Gulf Cooperation Council. In contrast, the effect is virtually absent for origin countries in Africa, driven by countries with weak government effectiveness. The estimates imply that bilateral labor agreements can lead to substantial welfare gains: low- and lower-middle-income countries can earn an additional US$120 million annually from a bilateral labor agreement. If countries in Sub-Saharan Africa were to experience similar impacts, the welfare gain from a single BLA could be as high as US$51 million per year for these origin countries.Publication Criss-Crossing Migration(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-07)The current perspective on the flow of people is almost exclusively focused on permanent migration from poorer to richer countries and on immigration policies in industrial countries. But international mobility of people should no longer be seen as a one-time event or one-way flow from South to North. The economic crisis has accentuated the longer-term shift in location incentives for people in industrial countries. As consumers, they could obtain better and cheaper access to key services -- such as care for the elderly, health, and education -- whose costs at home are projected to increase in the future, threatening standards of living. As workers, they could benefit from new opportunities created by the shift in economic dynamism from industrial to emerging countries. But subtle incentives to stay at home, such as lack of portability of health insurance and non-recognition of qualifications obtained abroad, inhibit North-South mobility and need to be addressed. Furthermore, if beneficiaries of movement abroad exert countervailing power against those who support immigration barriers at home, then that could lead to greater inflows of people, boosting innovation and growth in the North. Eventually, growing two-way flows of people could create the possibility of a grand bargain to reduce impediments to the movement of people at every stage in all countries and help realize the full benefits of globalization.Publication China in Regional Trade Agreements : Labor Mobility Provisions(World Bank, 2009-06-30)This report is structured in three volumes: competition provisions; environment provisions; and labor mobility provisions. The main messages of this three volumes are as follows: 1) competition laws and policies are increasingly being established at the regional level, as they could be instrumental in supporting the benefits of trade and investment liberalization; 2) China may want to use the opportunity of these negotiations to: (a) further discipline its state-owned enterprises;(b) carefully consider the possible role of antidumping policies; and (c) promote and lock-in domestic reforms aimed at improving its domestic competition policies; 3) with a shift of the development agenda from primarily pursuing growth to achieving a more balanced and sustainable development and taking into account China's high reliance on trade, it may be increasingly in China's interest to pro-actively engage its partners on environmental issues in its regional trade agreement (RTA) negotiations; and 4) while the world economy stands to gain massively from liberalization in the mobility of labor, adverse popular reaction to the economic and social impacts of immigrants has kept progress in enhancing global labor mobility well below progress in trade and capital liberalization.Publication The Impact of Credential Recognition(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-02)In 2020, amidst the COVID-19 crisis, the Peruvian government implemented a policy recognizing the foreign medical qualifications of immigrant health care workers. This study analyzes the labor market performance of Venezuelan health professionals with respect to other Venezuelans with university-level qualifications between 2018 and 2022. The findings show that health professionals experienced a marked improvement in their wages, significantly outperforming their fellow immigrants in sectors such as law and education. The analysis finds that compared to native Peruvian health professionals, Venezuelan health professionals experienced the highest positive impact on their income of all university-level professionals. However, although the effect is robust and statistically significant in the full sample and preferred specifications, it is not significant under alternative sampling restrictions. The study argues that the increased income of Venezuelan health professionals is related to the effectiveness of credential recognition policies in boosting the earnings of immigrants.