This paper evaluates the impact of market-oriented structural reforms, in particular labor market policies, social assistance programs, and trade liberalization on long run unemployment, wage inequality, and the distribution of employment across sectors in a small open economy with search frictions and idiosyncratic productivity shocks.
... See More + The paper builds a search and matching model of a labor market with a large informal sector and estimates the model using Colombian household-level data. Changes in labor taxes may have sizable aggregate, compositional, and distributional effects if workers associate high payroll taxes with more valuable and efficient social security services. The higher is the valuation of the services, the higher is the reduction in the log-wage gap. An expansion of public health insurance to informal sector workers has minor aggregate and distributional effects. Changes in relative prices that negatively affect the relative profitability of the formal sector have quite sizable aggregate effects, producing more long-run unemployment and informality, and increasing unemployment duration.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8574 SEP 05, 2018
There is a large and extensive literature examining the strength of agglomeration economies and, more generally, the determinants of spatial variations in productivity for developed countries.
... See More + However, the corresponding literature for developing countries is comparatively scant. This paper contributes to filling this knowledge gap by providing estimates for city productivity premiums and different sources of agglomeration effects for 16 countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region. While two of the countries in our sample -- Brazil and Colombia -- have been considered by the literature, the remaining 14 countries have not been previously analyzed. The paper presents estimates for the region as well as comparable estimates for each country using a harmonized data set with characteristics of individual workers and features of the cities in which the workers live. In addition to examining the strength of agglomeration economies, the roles of human capital externalities and market access in explaining subnational productivity variations are assessed. The paper finds that citywide human capital externalities appear much stronger than agglomeration economies in explaining productivity variation in all the considered countries. There is considerable heterogeneity in the estimated strength of human capital externalities across countries, which could be a reflection of country differences in educational quality.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8560 AUG 20, 2018
Estimating ex-ante distributional impacts of road infrastructure is increasingly important to better understand the poverty effects of these investments.
... See More + This note presents such analysis for the ongoing 4th generation (4G) road concessions program in Colombia, which involves the concession of 40 new roads and the transformation of 8,170 kilometers of road network. An ex-ante evaluation of the program suggests that 180,000 jobs will be created and that moderate and extreme poverty would decline by 0.5 and 0.3 percentage points, respectively.
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The development objective of Support to the First Bogota Metro Line Section One Project for Colombia is to improve access to jobs and quality transit for public transport users in the area of influence of the Bogota Metro Line 1, Section 1 (PLMB).
... See More + This project has two components. 1) The first component, Detailed Designs, initial construction works, including inter alia, civil works related to ground improvement and compacting for the rail yard, and initial pilling installation for the viaduct, and the works supervision contract for the Design‐Finance‐Build‐Operate‐Maintain‐Transfer (DFBOMT) contract. 2) The second component, Institutional and Policy Strengthening, includes strengthening the Borrower’s capacity through inter alia, carrying out of technical studies as needed for the implementation of the PLMB, including studies for the integration of the PLMB with the Integrated Public Transit System (SITP) (operational design, subsidy requirements, fare collection, among others), transit oriented development and land value capture instruments, detailed assessments of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions, local pollutants, noise and vibrations, and institutional strengthening of the Bogota metro company (EMB) and Bogota’s mobility sector, concerns for the security and safety of women in public transport, hiring of technical consultants and other consultants to support safeguard and fiduciary matters, and training.
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