Authors: Dino Merotto, Jörg Langbein, & Michael Weber In this blog, we explore how the challenges of delivering better jobs through structural change differ depending on where a country is in its demographic transition. We draw implications for jobs strategies in youthful countries. When developing countries enter the demographic transition the share of youth in…
Author: Dino Merotto Jobs Group, World Bank If you haven’t read Easterly and Levine’s “It’s Not Factor Accumulation” you should. But you should also read Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare’s “The Neoclassical Revival in Growth Economics: Has It Gone Too Far?”. Since it was published in 2001, Easterly and Levine’s ideas have shaped much of World Bank…
By JAVIER SANCHEZ-REAZA There is no doubt that technology is improving our daily lives. We ask Siri to set the alarm for us, let Spotify guide us through a gym session, and rely on Waze to navigate the city. What is less obvious is how technology is also on the brink of completely reshaping our…
Authors: NAMITA DATTA APARNA KRISHNAMURTHY NAZRENE MANNIE The lack of a sufficiently skilled workforce remains a significant challenge in the labor market. Around the world, employers say that schools and universities aren’t preparing students well enough for the workforce. How can employers work with schooling and post-schooling systems to design curricula that align with labor market needs? Employers could benefit…
Authors: Andreas Eberhard-Ruiz and Kevwe Pela, Jobs Group, World Bank. In this blog, we explore whether the process of structural change differs between resource-rich and resource-poor economies, and discuss the implications of our findings for jobs strategies in resource-rich countries. The ‘Great Convergence’ of global incomes seen over the last 30 years, was triggered by…
Authors: Dino Merotto and Elena Casanovas, Jobs Group, World Bank. In in blog #2 and blog #3 in this series we focused on the evolution of the sectoral pattern of production and jobs as countries develop. But new research suggests that changing patterns of consumption and net trade should also be taken into account when…
Author: Andreas Eberhard-Ruiz, Jobs Group, World Bank. Out of 48 countries whose per capita income more than doubled in real terms since 1991, 47 experienced a decline in the share of workers in the agriculture sector, and in 27 of them, this decline exceeded ten percentage points. However, the sectoral shift in employment is not…
Author: Andreas Eberhard-Ruiz, Jobs Group, World Bank. Between 1996 and 2003, Nigeria’s per capita GDP grew by almost 3 percent per annum and the proportion of people living under US$ 1.90 per day – the World Bank’s threshold to measure extreme poverty – fell from 64 percent to 54 percent. By contrast, poverty did not…
Authors: Michael Weber and Jörg Langbein, Jobs Group, World Bank. Waged employment is the pathway to better jobs for most workers. Workers in waged jobs have more stable and higher earnings, better quality employment, and longer work relationships than many other types of employment (Merotto, Weber & Aterido, 2018). Yet, employment patterns vary greatly by…
Author: Dino Merotto, Jobs Group, World Bank. Blog #1 in our series showed that growth in labor productivity explains the differences in per capita income growth across countries. When we break down labor productivity growth into within and between sector components, we see that the reallocation of labor from lower productivity agriculture to higher productivity…