Publication: How Did the COVID-19 Crisis Affect Different Types of Workers in the Developing World?
Date
2021-07
ISSN
Published
2021-07
Author(s)
Kugler, Maurice
Viollaz, Mariana
Duque, Daniel
Newhouse, David
Palacios-Lopez, Amparo
Weber, Michael
Abstract
This paper investigates the impacts of
the economic shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the
employment of different types of workers in developing
countries. Employment outcomes are taken from a set of
high-frequency phone surveys conducted by the World Bank and
National Statistics Offices in 40 countries. Larger shares
of female, young, less educated, and urban workers stopped
working. Gender gaps in work stoppage were particularly
pronounced and stemmed mainly from differences within
sectors rather than differential employment patterns across
sectors. Differences in work stoppage between urban and
rural workers were markedly smaller than those across
gender, age, and education groups. Preliminary results from
10 countries suggest that following the initial shock at the
start of the pandemic, employment rates partially recovered
between April and August, with greater gains for those
groups that had borne the brunt of the early jobs losses.
Although the high-frequency phone surveys greatly
over-represent household heads and therefore overestimate
employment rates, case studies in five countries suggest
that they provide a reasonably accurate measure of
disparities in employment levels by gender, education, and
urban or rural location following the onset of the crisis,
although they perform less well in capturing disparities
between age groups. These results shed new light on the
labor market consequences of the COVID-19 crisis in
developing countries, and suggest that real-time phone
surveys, despite their lack of representativeness, are a
valuable source of information to measure differential
employment impacts across groups during a crisis.
Citation
“Kugler, Maurice; Viollaz, Mariana; Duque, Daniel; Gaddis, Isis; Newhouse, David; Palacios-Lopez, Amparo; Weber, Michael. 2021. How Did the COVID-19 Crisis Affect Different Types of Workers in the Developing World?. Jobs Working Paper;No. 60. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35950 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”