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Knowing When You Do Not Know
Economists have long sought to predict how macroeconomic shocks will affect individual welfare. Macroeconomic data and forecasts are easily available when crises strike. But policy action requires not only understanding the magnitude of a macro shock, but also identifying which households or individuals are being hurt by (or benefit from) the crisis. A popular solution is to extrapolate the welfare impact of a shock from the historical response of income or consumption poverty to changes in output, by estimating an 'elasticity' of poverty to growth. Although this method provides an estimate for the aggregate poverty impact of a macro shock, it has limited value for analysts and policymakers ...
Off and Running?
The authors describe the evolution of relative wages in five Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They use repeated cross-sections of household surveys, and decompose the evolution of relative wages into factors associated with changes in relative supply and relative demand. The authors have three main conclusions: 1) Increases in the relative wages of the most skilled (university-educated) workers took place concurrently with increases in their relative abundance in all of the countries except Brazil. This is strong evidence of increases in the demand for skilled workers. 2) Increases in the wage bill of skilled workers occurred largely within sectors, an...
Back to Work
What can be done to create more and better jobs in Europe and Central Asia? And should there be specific policies to help workers access those jobs? The authors of this book examine these questions through the lens of two contextual factors: the legacy of centralized planned economies and the mounting demographic pressures associated with rapid aging in some countries and soaring numbers of youth entering the workforce in others. The authors find the following: Market reforms pay off, albeit with a lag, in terms of jobs and productivity. A small fraction of superstar high-growth firms accounts for most of the new jobs created in the region. Skills gaps hinder employment prospects, especially...
Does Eurosclerosis Matter?
"Whether or not labor market rigidities are an important contributor to persistently high levels of unemployment remains at the center of an important debate in Europe. European labor markets are often viewed as rigid and inflexible in opposition to those in North America where legislation is less protective and fosters more mobility. This paper shows that the labor market policies adopted by Central and Eastern European countries, aspiring to join the European Union, do not appear excessively rigid. However, significant and wide- ranging economic reform programs make it difficult to assess the impact of labor market institutions."
Unemployment, Skills, and Incentives
In situations where tenure insecurity is pervasive (as in Nicaragua), systematic efforts of land regularization can have positive effects on productivity as well as equity.
Short But Not Sweet
India spends 6 percent of its GDP on health-three times the amount spent by Indonesia and twice that of China-and spending on non-chronic morbidities is three times that of chronic illnesses. It is normally assumed that the high spending on non-chronic illnesses reflects the prevalence of morbidities with high case-fatality or case-disability ratios. But there is little data that can be used to separate out spending by type of illness. The authors address this issue with a unique dataset where 1,621 individuals in Delhi were observed for 16 weeks through detailed weekly interviews on morbidity and health-seeking behavior. The authors' findings are surprising and contrary to the normal view o...
Changes in Returns to Education in Latin America
Changes in the relative wages of workers with different amounts of education have profound implications for developing countries, where initial levels of inequality are often very high. In this paper we use micro data for five Latin American countries over the 1980s and 1990s to document trends in men's returns to education, and to estimate whether the changes in skill premia we observe can be explained by supply or demand factors. We propose a model of demand for skills with three production inputs, and we allow the elasticity of substitution between the different educational inputs to be different using a nested CES function. Using this model, we show that the dramatic expansion in secondary school in many countries in Latin America depressed the wages of workers with secondary school. We also show that there have been sharp increases in the demand for more skilled workers in the region.
Simulating Distributional Impacts of Macro-dynamics
Simulating Distributional Impacts of Macro-dynamics: Theory and Practical Applications is a comprehensive guide for analyzing and understanding the effects of macroeconomic shocks on income and consumption distribution, as well as using the ADePT Simulation Module. Since real-time micro data is rarely available, the Simulation Module (part of the ADePT economic analysis software) takes advantage of historical household surveys to estimate how current or proposed macro changes might impact household and individuals welfare. Using examples from different economic and social contexts, the book explains macro-micro linkages in an easy and intuitive way. After developing a sound theoretical found...
Unemployment, Skills, and Incentives
The author studies the potential disincentive effects of unemployment insurance, and social assistance payments on the duration of unemployment in the Slovak Republic. For this purpose, she uses new, very detailed data on receipt of benefits from the Unemployment Registry (1990-2000) and the Labor Force Survey (1996, 1999, and 2000). She employs a flexible methodology that makes it possible to identify behavioral changes that may occur as the quantity, and duration of the benefits change over time, as well as behavioral differences between recipients, and non-recipients. This approach, she argues, constitutes a more accurate test for the presence of incentive, and disincentive effects, than ...
