Publication: Skills for Work in Bulgaria: The Relationship between Cognitive and Socioemotional Skills and Labor Market Outcomes
Loading...
Published
2016-01
ISSN
Date
2016-03-01
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Bulgaria is undergoing both a rapid demographic transition and a significant structural shift in its economy. Increasing longevity combined with low fertility and emigration have made Bulgaria’s age structure increasingly top-heavy and its dependency ratios higher. At the same time, the economic sectors that absorbed low-skilled workers during the high-growth early 2000s, such as construction and manufacturing, were those that contracted most during the 2008–09 economic crisis and they have not yet recovered. Meanwhile, activities demanding high-skilled labor, such as financial and business services and information, communication, and technology (ICT), have been faring relatively well. This study uses a new dataset with direct measures of cognitive and socio-emotional skills to examine the relationship between skills and labor market outcomes in Bulgaria. For a long time, labor market studies had to rely on formal educational attainment as a measure of an individual’s skills. However, the correlation between formal education and skills is not perfect, and not all diplomas are equal in terms of imparting certain skills to students. Moreover, valuable skills can be acquired without formal diplomas, for example through on-the-job training or learning-by doing. In addition to using educational attainment this study therefore looks at direct measures of two types of skills that employer’s value: cognitive skills, such as functional literacy and numeracy, and socio-emotional skills, such as self-discipline, perseverance, and ability to work well with others. The objective is to assess the extent to which these direct measures shed light on what matters for labor market success, defined as being in the labor force, being employed, and earning more. This analysis relies on original data (the Bulgarian Longitudinal Inclusive Society Survey, BLISS) collected by the World Bank and Open Society Institute–Sofia in the spring of 2013, which for the first time in the country included nationally-representative information on the cognitive and socio-emotional skills of the working-age population.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2016. Skills for Work in Bulgaria: The Relationship between Cognitive and Socioemotional Skills and Labor Market Outcomes. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23795 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication The Skills Road : Skills for Employability in Uzbekistan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-09)This report addresses a fundamental question facing policymakers in Uzbekistan: are worker skills hindering employment outcomes? The main finding of the report is that, indeed, worker skills gaps are hindering employment outcomes in Uzbekistan. In fact, employers—particularly formal sector employers—seek workers who possess both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The higher employability and higher wage rates among higher skilled workers is mostly explained by the use of those skills in workplaces. But, skills gaps persist, leading a large share of employers to report shortages of high-skilled workers. These shortages are resulting in high wage premiums—tertiary graduates earn on average 55 percent more than similar workers with a general secondary education. However, large variations in observed skills among adults with the same level of educational attainment indicate that formal education is failing too many people. The report outlines weaknesses in the way skills are formed in Uzbekistan. While skills are developed during different stages in the life cycle and a host of actors are involved—families, for example, play a central role—the education and training system has a mixed record in skill formation. The report argues that the government could do more to align the skills imparted through the education and training system with the needs of employers. The government can also do more to get children off to the right start by investing in early childhood development, where rates of return to investment are generally very high and important soft skills are learned. Finally, more can be done to match the supply of skills with employer demand by improving the use of information in matching skills to jobs in the labor market.Publication Labor Markets for Inclusive Growth(Washington, DC, 2013-04)This policy note outlines short, and medium-term policy options for addressing critical challenges affecting labor markets in Mexico, and in particular labor productivity. As labor is the main source of income for most of the population, poverty is closely linked to underemployment and low wages. Yet labor markets have played a limited role in poverty reduction in Mexico. Labor income accounted for just 22 percent of the decline in poverty in Mexico over the last decade compared with 38 percent in the rest of the region. Between the third quarter of 2008 and the third quarter of 2011, the labor income poverty index2 continued to decline in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru but increased in Mexico. The equivalent measure produced by CONEVAL (Consejo Nacional de Evaluation), shows the labor poverty trend to be increasing through the first quarter of 2012. Finding the right bundle of policies to improve labor productivity and the functioning of the labor markets can serve to improve economic growth and welfare outcomes.Publication The Private Sector and Youth Skills and Employment Programs in Low and Middle-Income Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015)Getting youth into productive employment is an urgent policy issue for countries around the world. Many governments in low and middle-income countries are actively engaged in policies to help youth attain the skills they need to do well in work and in life, as well as to find suitable employment. The involvement of the private sector in youth skills development and employment is a complex issue because the nature of the firms and their motivations vary significantly. Multinational corporations operating in low and middle-income countries may be motivated by direct productivity or profit objectives - to secure a skilled workforce, or reliable suppliers - but also, or even primarily, by corporate social responsibility (CSR) factors. Firms that supply training or employment services will be driven by profit considerations when entering these markets and deciding what services to offer and to whom. The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to provide a comprehensive look at the way the private sector is involved in youth skills and employment in low- and middle-income countries, considering the broad range of program types and firm types; (2) to present and interpret the available evidence of the effectiveness of this involvement; and (3) to understand where the private sector has been most effective at promoting young people’s labor market success, and what can be done to enhance the role of the private sector to achieve this objective. The report is organized as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two provides background to the analysis of the private sector role in youth employment in low- and middle-income countries. In chapter three the authors characterize the private sector’s role more systematically using the youth employment inventory, a global database of interventions that are designed to integrate young people into the labor market. Chapter four reviews the evidence of effectiveness of youth interventions involving the private sector. Chapter five briefly draws together strands from the previous review, as well as from the broader literature, to gain an understanding of the institutional and other factors leading to (and in other cases preventing) successful public-private partnerships for youth employment. Chapter six summarizes the main findings of this review, and is followed by a discussion of key gaps in knowledge on the role of the private sector in different types of youth employment intervention that future research should attempt to address, and a review of the main lessons for policy and programming emerging from the study.Publication Bulgaria : Workforce Development(Washington, DC, 2014)This report presents a comprehensive diagnostic assessment of Bulgaria's workforce development (WfD) policies and institutions. The results are based on a new World Bank tool designed for this purpose, SABER-WfD. SABER-WfD is part of the World Bank's initiative on Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) whose aim is to provide systematic assessment and documentation of the policy and institutional factors that influence the performance of key areas of national education and training systems. The SABER-WfD tool encompasses initial, continuing and targeted vocational education and training that are offered through multiple channels and focuses largely on programs at the secondary and post-secondary levels.Publication Linking Education Policy to Labor Market Outcomes(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008)Education plays a central role in preparing individuals to enter the labor force, as well as equipping them with the skills to engage in lifelong learning experiences. The objective of this study is to review what is known about the role of education in improving labor market outcomes, with a particular focus on policy considerations for developing countries. The report presents findings from current literature on the topic, which offers new ways of looking at the returns to education, together with evidence from four original data analysis and background studies of education and labor issues in Ghana and Pakistan. Country studies on Ghana and Pakistan are used to substantiate findings of the literature and illustrate the heterogeneity of education labor market linkages across regions. These countries were chosen because they are representative of two of the poorest regions of the world and because their inclusion in the analysis complements ongoing World Bank work on education and labor market issues in those countries. This report offers two types of findings: those relevant to the content of educational policies and those relevant to the framework for educational policy making.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication MIGA Annual Report 2013 : Insuring Investments, Ensuring Opportunities(Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2013-10-11)In fiscal year 2013, Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) issued 2.8 billion dollars in investment guarantees for projects in our developing member countries. At 1.5 billion dollars, representing more than half of new business, the bulk of MIGA's guarantees issued support investments in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sixty-nine percent of new business volume this year was in complex projects in infrastructure and extractive industries, a strategic priority for the Agency. This year, 82 percent of MIGA's new volume fell into one or more of strategic priority areas: investments in the world's poorest countries, "South-South" investments, investments in conflict-affected countries, and investments in complex projects. MIGA also established the conflict-affected and fragile economies facility to further deepen support to this priority area.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 The Role of Social Ties in Factor Allocation(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-10)We investigate whether social structure helps or hinders factor allocation using unusually rich data from the Gambia. Evidence indicates that land available for cultivation is allocated unequally across households; and that factor transfers are more common between neighbors, co-ethnics, and kinship-related households. Does this lead to the conclusion that land inequality is due to flows of land between households being impeded by social divisions? To answer this question, a novel methodology that approaches exhaustive data on dyadic flows from an aggregate point of view is introduced. Land transfers lead to a more equal distribution of land and to more comparable factor ratios across households in general. But equalizing transfers of land are not more likely within ethnic or kinship groups. In conclusion, ethnic and kinship divisions do not hinder land and labor transfers in a way that contributes to aggregate factor inequality. Labor transfers do not equilibrate factor ratios across households. But it cannot be ruled out that they serve a beneficial role, for example, to deal with unanticipated health shocks.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 The Firm-Level Impact of the Covid–19 Pandemic(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09-02)The World Bank commissioned a firm-level survey to provide quantitative evidence of the impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Two rounds of data have now been collected for the months of March and May using a nationally representative World Bank survey providing information on the impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The survey includes five hundred firms spanning a wide range of industries and firm sizes, as well as the formal and informal sector. This note provides a snapshot of how the firms’ outcomes and response to the pandemic have changed between the months of March and May 2020.