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…
Author: Dino Merotto, Jobs Group, World Bank. Blog #2 in our series showed how the share of employment in services rises as countries get richer, and the share in agriculture falls. In this blog, we combine the pattern of GDP with that of employment. Three simple charts show vividly how both the structure of GDP…
Authors: Dino Merotto and Andreas Eberhard-Ruiz, Jobs Group, World Bank. Data on employment shares by sector show the rising importance of service jobs as countries get richer – and a corresponding decline in the share of agriculture jobs. Manufacturing, in contrast, plays a much less important part in the shift to higher incomes and it…
Authors: Dino Merotto and Andreas Eberhard-Ruiz, Jobs Group, World Bank. Perhaps the most fundamental finding from Jobs Diagnostics is that it isn’t adding more of the existing stock of jobs that raises a country’s per capita income. Rather, it is improving the productivity of a country’s jobs that matters more. When we split the sources…
Think of an of an image of globalization and you may picture a Bangladeshi woman in a sari stitching together a t-shirt displaying a pop-culture phrase for a fast-fashion outlet in London or Los Angeles.
Imagine this prosperous future for the Middle East and North Africa: innovation and technology permeate dynamic markets, society flourishes with the economic inclusion of youth, women and the less fortunate, and economies capitalize on the massive investments made during the past few decades.