This paper compiles project-level data from the World Bank's lending history to describe patterns and the composition of its portfolio. The paper focuses particularly on the effect of countries' transition from International Development Association to International Bank for Reconstruction and Development status, which marks the point when countries start borrowing at near market rates, on lending for human development sectors (education, health and social protection).
... See More + Using country and year fixed effects, which account for unobservable country characteristics (for example, national priorities) and time effects (for example, market interest rates), the paper finds that human development lending decreases when countries graduate from the International Development Association. The average difference in the binary indicator of lending for any sector is 27 percent while it is 60 percent for human development sectors. The share of human development lending (lending by human development Global Practices over total lending) is also 6.9 percentage points (30 percent) lower. This decline in human development lending in International Bank for Reconstruction and Development countries is accompanied by a greater use of budget support. The results are robust to controlling for non-World Bank aid, as well as various alternative specifications and estimation samples.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8716 JAN 23, 2019
Digital technologies affect employment through complex channels: automation, connectivity, and innovation. Labor-saving technologies coupled with reshoring may disrupt labor markets in developing countries and result in job losses.
... See More + Yet, technological change drives productivity gains in both white-collar and blue-collar jobs either through ICT uptake or modern mechanical technologies. The ‘gig economy’ changes the traditional employer-employee relationship as it introduces new types of work. Digital platforms increase flexibility and labor market transparency, but delink workers from employers and from social benefits and protections making them more vulnerable. Policymakers in rich and poor countries alike should rethink social protection mechanisms. Technology diffusion has created divided worlds varying by region and income level. Job automation is likely to have a greater impact on less skilled workers than those with a university education (40 percent versus 5 percent in OECD countries). Moving towards a digital economy will reward those with access to broadband connectivity, strong institutions, and digital literacy. Future workers must acquire basic IT skills together with socio emotional skills that adapt to a lifelong learning environment in a changing jobs landscape. Technology can also increase labor market access for women and persons with disabilities, given the right ‘analog’ complements are in place. Technological change will affect the number, quality, and distribution of jobs across the world. In developing countries, the future workforce should be ready to embrace technology, digital literacy, and connectedness—bringing everyone closer to the technological frontier.
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By improving their skills, health, knowledge, and resilience—their human capital—people can be more productive, flexible, and innovative. Human capital is a central driver of sustainable growth and poverty reduction.
... See More + Investments in human capital have become more important as the nature of work has evolved. Yet despite substantial progress, significant gaps in human capital investments are leaving the world poorly prepared for what lies ahead. The World Bank Group has launched the Human Capital Project (HCP) to mobilize efforts to address these gaps. The project is intended to raise awareness of the costs of inaction and make the case for investing in people through country engagement and analytical work. The goal of the HCP is a world in which all children arrive at school ready to learn, the time spent in school translates into better learning, and they can grow up to live and work as healthy, skilled, and productive adults. The main text of this volume—which also appears as chapter 3 in the 2019 World Development Report: The Changing Nature of Work —describes the evidence supporting the importance of human capital for people, economies, and societies and lays out the rationale and context for the HCP’s theory of change. The Human Capital Index methodology is detailed in the appendix.
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The forthcoming World Development Report (WDR) 2019: The Changing Nature of Work studies how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today.
... See More + Fears that robots will take away jobs from people have dominated the discussion over the future of work, but the World Development Report 2019 finds that on balance this appears to be unfounded. Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. Firms adopt new ways of production, markets expand, and societies evolve. Overall, technology brings opportunity, paving the way to create new jobs, increase productivity, and deliver effective public services. Firms can grow rapidly thanks to digital transformation, expanding their boundaries and reshaping traditional production patterns. The rise of the digital platform firm means that technological effects reach more people faster than ever before. Technology is changing the skills that employers seek. Workers need to be better at complex problem-solving, teamwork and adaptability. Digital technology is also changing how people work and the terms on which they work. Even in advanced economies, short-term work, often found through online platforms, is posing similar challenges to those faced by the world's informal workers. The Report analyzes these changes and considers how governments can best respond. Investing in human capital must be a priority for governments in order for workers to build the skills in demand in the labor market. In addition, governments need to enhance social protection and extend it to all people in society, irrespective of the terms on which they work. To fund these investments in human capital and social protection, the Report offers some suggestions as to how governments can mobilize additional revenues by increasing the tax base.
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This note summarizes some of the key contributions in the macro- and micro- economic literature on the pathways linking human capital and income growth.
... See More + Rather than completeness, the objective of this work is to distill some of the most relevant threads in the evolution of these literatures using a human capital lens, with a view to provide a useful yet parsimonious conceptual framework and an update on empirical results. The note first describes the human capital model (section 1). It then outlines the main theoretical elements of growth theory and presents empirical results from the cross-country regressions and development accounting literature to gauge to what extent human capital affects growth at the aggregate level (sections 2, 3 and 4). The note then reviews the micro empirical literature estimating labor income returns of human capital investments (sections 5 and 6). The conclusion draws comparisons between the two empirical approaches and provides a brief critical assessment on how to interpret the empirical results. Investing in human capital is a promising strategy to attain stable and positive growth. The magnitude of the effects is country-specific and varies depending on the population of interest, the policy under consideration, and the human capital component considered.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8309 JAN 19, 2018
This policy note analyzes the profile of the out of work in Poland and compares this with the current set of labor market policies, in particular Public Employment Services.
... See More + The note relied on existing data from the Polish Labor Force Survey, the tax and benefit model, expenditure data in Poland and the EU, qualitative and institutional analysis to prepare a profile of the out of work population, understand the various segments of vulnerable populations in need and the contrast it with the supply and quality of services for labor market support.
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Working Paper 125989 MAR 01, 2016
Morgandi,Matteo; Gatti,Roberta V.; Damerau,Tomas M.; Oberlander,Lisa Johanna; Goraus,KarolinaPolishDisclosed
This policy note analyzes the profile of the out of work in Poland and compares this with the current set of labor market policies, in particular Public Employment Services.
... See More + The note relied on existing data from the Polish Labor Force Survey, the tax and benefit model, expenditure data in Poland and the EU, qualitative and institutional analysis to prepare a profile of the out of work population, understand the various segments of vulnerable populations in need and the contrast it with the supply and quality of services for labor market support.
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Working Paper 125989 MAR 01, 2016
Morgandi,Matteo; Gatti,Roberta V.; Damerau,Tomas M.; Oberlander,Lisa Johanna; Goraus,KarolinaEnglishDisclosed
Many Roma are among the poorest and most vulnerable Europeans, facing poverty, exclusion, and discrimination. In European Union member countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with substantial Roma populations, inequalities between Roma and non-Roma start early and are striking.
... See More + Some of these inequalities reflect hard-wired family circumstances. For example, a Roma child is much more likely to grow up in a household at the very bottom of the income distribution, or have parents with little or no education. Other inequalities reflect limited opportunities such as access to basic goods and services (e.g., quality education and adequate living conditions), which are necessary not only for realizing one's potential in life, but also for living with dignity. This book focuses on identifying pathways to promote fair chances for disadvantaged Roma in CEE countries. Investing early, by promoting good nutrition, cognitive child development, and access to quality education is a policy with recognized high returns, especially for disadvantaged children.
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Publication 102804 FEB 06, 2016
Gatti,Roberta V.; Karacsony,Sandor I.; Anan,Kosuke; Ferre,Celine; De Paz Nieves,CarmenDisclosed
This paper analyzes the legal and actual gaps in working conditions and returns between permanent and temporary contracts, with a focus on civil law contracts, which are at the center of the debate on widening labor market duality in Poland.
... See More + We find that net employment creation in recent years occurred largely through involuntary temporary contracts, especially among the low-skilled and young people. Even accounting for workers heterogeneity, we find a persistent wage gap between permanent and temporary contracts, and limited mobility across contract typologies. Insights from qualitative evidence suggest that narrowing duality without hurting the most vulnerable workers will require a reduction in administrative burdens and implicit costs associated with permanent labor contracts, while eliminating firms’ incentives to strictly prefer temporary contracts.
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Economic growth has been sustained for many years pre-crisis in the region, but this has not resulted in the creation of an adequate number of jobs and has succeeded, at best, in generating low-quality, informal jobs.
... See More + The report addresses one margin of exclusion: informal employment and the vulnerabilities and lack of opportunities associated with it. The report analyzes the constraints that prevent informal workers from becoming formal and discusses policy options to effectively address these constraints. This report looks at informality through a human development angle and focuses particularly on informal employment. Informality is a complex phenomenon, comprising unpaid workers and workers without social security or health insurance coverage, small or micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and large registered firms that may partially evade corporate taxes and social security contributions. The first section provides a detailed profile of informal workers in the region. The second section describes the characteristics of informality in micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and in larger firms that do not fully comply with social security contribution requirements and tax obligations. The third section presents informality and the firm. The fourth section focuses on informality: choice or exclusion? The fifth section discusses policy options for effectively expanding coverage of health insurance and pension systems and promoting the creation of better quality jobs.
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Publication 90271 AUG 26, 2014
Gatti, Roberta; Angel-Urdinola, Diego F.; Silva, Joana; Bodor, AndrasDisclosed
Jobs are crucial for individual well-being. They provide a livelihood and, equally important, a sense of dignity. They are also crucial for collective well-being and economic growth.
... See More + However, the rules and incentives that govern labor markets in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries have led to in efficient and inequitable outcomes, both individually and collectively. Several underlying distortions prevent a more productive use of human capital and have led to a widespread sense of unfairness and exclusion, of which the Arab Spring was a powerful expression. The Middle East and North Africa has a large reservoir of untapped human resources, with the world's highest unemployment rate among youth and the lowest participation of females in the labor force. Desirable jobs, defined as high paying or formal jobs, are few, and private employment is overwhelmingly of low added value. Overall, the region's labor markets can be characterized as being in efficient, inequitable, and locked in low productivity equilibrium.
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This overview first describes the magnitude of the informality phenomenon in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region vis-a-vis other regions of the world and, to the extent possible, its evolution over time and macroeconomic determinants.
... See More + Section two provides a detailed profile of informal workers in the region. Section three describes the characteristics of informality in micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and in larger firms that do not fully comply with social security contribution requirements and tax obligations. Section four discusses earnings, job mobility patterns, attitudes, and workers' self-rated job satisfaction to provide a better understanding of the quality of jobs in the informal sector. The evidence corroborates that important segmentations exist between formal and informal jobs, and that much of the observed informality is likely due to barriers to mobility into better jobs; in some countries, these barriers are linked to the prominent role of the public sector as the main employer. Finally, section five discusses policy options for effectively expanding coverage of health insurance or pension systems and promoting the creation of better quality jobs.
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Working Paper 67590 SEP 01, 2011
Gatti, Roberta; Angel-Urdinola, Diego F.; Silva, Joana; Bodor, AndrasDisclosed
Increased labor mobility bears large potential benefits for human development and poverty reduction through various channels including more competitive global labor markets and increased efficiency in the matching of skills supply and demand.
... See More + Bank support for enhanced and better managed migration can complement broader efforts to reduce poverty and promote human development, similarly to how Bank projects on trade liberalization have helped in reducing market distortions and raise welfare. With Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries becoming increasingly eager to adopt a proactive approach to improve migration outcomes, cross-sectoral Bank teams are well positioned to respond to increasing demand for migration management systems. Labor mobility has proven to be a forceful driver of convergence in living standards. Estimates suggest that gains from the liberalization of migration could surpass welfare gains from trade liberalization. Currently, migration represents the main form of global and regional integration for MENA countries. In the future, increased labor mobility could foster regional economic integration, a recognized priority within the Arab World Initiative (AWI).
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In the last century most countries have experienced both an increase in pension spending and a decline in fertility. The authors argue that the interplay of pension generosity and development of capital markets is crucial to understand fertility decisions.
... See More + Since children have traditionally represented for parents a form of retirement saving, particularly in economies with limited or non-existent capital markets, an exogenous increase of pension spending provides a saving technology alternative to children, thus relaxing financial (saving) constraints and reducing fertility. The authors build a simple two-period overlapping generations (OLG) model to show that an increase in pensions is associated with a larger decrease in fertility in countries in which individuals have less access to financial markets. Cross-country regression analysis supports result: an interaction between various measures of pension generosity and a proxy for the development of financial markets consistently enters the regressions positively and significantly, suggesting that in economies with limited financial markets, children represent a way for parents to save for old age, and that increases in pensions amount effectively to relaxing these constraints.
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Working Paper (Numbered Series) 47101 DEC 01, 2008
This paper exploits a unique longitudinal data set from Tanzania to examine the consequences of child labor on education, employment choices, and marital status over a 10-year horizon.
... See More + Shocks to crop production and rainfall are used as instrumental variables for child labor. For boys, the findings show that a one-standard-deviation (5.7 hour) increase in child labor leads 10 years later to a loss of approximately one year of schooling and to a substantial increase in the likelihood of farming and of marrying at a younger age. Strikingly, there are no significant effects on education for girls, but there is a significant increase in the likelihood of marrying young. The findings also show that crop shocks lead to an increase in agricultural work for boys and instead lead to an increase in chore hours for girls. The results are consistent with education being a lower priority for girls and/or with chores causing less disruption for education than agricultural work. The increased chore hours could also account for the results on marriage for girls.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS4677 JUL 01, 2008
The authors use firm-level, cross-county data from Investment Climate surveys in 49 developing countries to investigate an important channel through which informality can affect productivity: access to credit and external finance.
... See More + Informality is measured as self-reported lack of tax compliance in a sample of registered firms that also answered questions on a large set of other characteristics. The authors find that more tax compliance is significantly associated with more access to credit both in OLS and in country fixed effects estimates. In particular, the link between credit and formality is stronger in high-formality countries. This suggests that firms' balance sheets are relatively more informative for financial institutions in environments where signal extraction is a less noisy process. The authors' results are robust to the inclusion of a wide array of correlates and to two-stage estimation.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS4476 JAN 01, 2008
Although it is widely accepted that financial development is associated with higher growth, the evidence on the channels through which credit affects growth on the micro-level is scant.
... See More + Using data from a cross section of Bulgarian firms, the authors estimate the impact of access to credit (as proxied by indicators of whether firms have access to a credit or overdraft facility) on productivity. To overcome potential omitted variable bias of OLS estimates, they use information on firms' past growth to instrument for access to credit. The authors find credit to be positively and strongly associated with total factor productivity. These results are robust to a wide range of robustness checks.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS3921 MAY 01, 2006
Although there is extensive literature on the determinants of child labor and many initiatives aimed at combating it, there is limited evidence on the consequences of child labor on socioeconomic outcomes such as education, wages, and health.
... See More + The authors evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy. Five years subsequent to the child labor experience, they find significant negative effects on school participation and educational attainment, but also find substantially higher earnings for those (young) adults who worked as children. The authors find no significant effects on health. Over a longer horizon, they estimate that from age 30 onward the forgone earnings attributable to lost schooling exceed any earnings gain associated with child labor and that the net present discounted value of child labor is positive for discount rates of 11.5 percent or higher. The authors show that child labor is prevalent among households likely to have higher borrowing costs, that are farther from schools, and whose adult members experienced negative returns to their own education. This evidence suggests that reducing child labor will require facilitating access to credit and will also require households to be forward looking.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS3479 JAN 01, 2005
Using individual-level data for 35 countries, the authors investigate the microeconomic determinants of attitudes toward corruption. They find women, employed, less wealthy, and older individuals to be more averse to corruption.
... See More + The authors also provide evidence that social effects play an important role in determining individual attitudes toward corruption, as these are robustly and significantly associated with the average level of tolerance of corruption in the region. This finding lends empirical support to theoretical models where corruption emerges in multiple equilibria and suggests that "big-push" policies might be particularly effective in combating corruption.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS3122 AUG 01, 2003
Roberta Gatti; Stefano Paternostro; Jamele Rigolini
Although a growing theoretical literature points to credit constraints as an important source of inefficiently high child labor, little work has been done to assess its empirical relevance.
... See More + Using panel data from Tanzania, the authors find that households respond to transitory income shocks by increasing child labor, but that the extent to which child labor is used as a buffer is lower when households have access to credit. These findings contribute to the empirical literature on the permanent income hypothesis by showing that credit-constrained households actively use child labor to smooth their income. Moreover, they highlight a potentially important determinant of child labor and, as a result, a mechanism that can be used to tackle it.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS3075 MAY 30, 2003
Dehejia, Rajeev H.; Beegle, Kathleen; Gatti, Roberta
