About the Jobs Group

About The Jobs Group

The Jobs Group is a cross-cutting unit at the World Bank Group (WBG), governed by a Bank-wide Steering Committee and hosted in the Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice. The Group identifies best practices and seeks solutions to create better jobs and improve labor market outcomes and opportunities, especially for low-income households and excluded groups.

We work with our WBG colleagues across 14 Global Practices and the IFC, generating, testing, and sharing best practices, including through our blogs. We develop resources and tools for practitioners to use and we host training events.

Context Strategy Partners

Where Do We Work?

The Jobs Group currently works in over 40 countries, spread across six regions, supporting jobs diagnostics and strategies, sectoral pilots and evaluations, and lending operations. Of these, half are among the world’s 75 poorest countries, supported by the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA).

Countries

World Bank Group projects with active jobs-themed projects

580

Total World Bank Group investments in jobs-themed projects

Billion

Current World Bank Group projects include a jobs theme

Beneficiaries of job-focused interventions

55.7

Million

November, 2020

Jobs Diagnostics and Strategies

We help countries identify jobs challenges by analyzing their macroeconomy, labor market, and private sector growth, compared with international benchmarks. Jobs Diagnostics (JDs) highlight the market and policy failures that hamper private investment and job creation and propose ways to correct them. Our JD findings are integrated into our Strategic Country Diagnostics (SCDs) and Country Economic Memoranda (CEM), which inform our Country Partnerships Frameworks (CPFs). JDs draw on the Jobs Indicators (JOIN) database, a global statistical resource curated by the Jobs Group. JOIN data are also widely used in other Bank reports, briefings, and blogs. In 2019 we made JOIN available to users outside the Bank; launched a course with hands-on training on JD tools and techniques for developing country governments and other donor agencies; and created a Jobs Diagnostics and Solutions Practitioners Network.

Operationalizing support for jobs transformations

The World Bank Group finances investment operations which are relevant to improving jobs outcomes. We do this through IDA and IBRD policy lending, lending for results and investment lending, and IFC investment operations. In 2019, our jobs-related projects reached almost 10 million beneficiaries, including 6.5 million in IDA countries and 3 million female beneficiaries.

Key points of entry include: macroeconomic and regulatory reform; finance sector development and infrastructure programs which enable better opportunities for private investment; support to agricultural value chains that link farmers to markets on more favorable terms; targeted programs to support private sector development (e.g. Special Economic Zones and SME development programs); spatial development programs that create spaces for better jobs and help workers access them (e.g. secondary city development); environment programs (e.g. the promotion of “green jobs” ); and human capital programs (education, training, active labor market policies, and social protection).

Jobs and Economic Transformation

Jobs and COVID-19

The disruptive impact of the COVID-19 crisis on workers, labor markets, and livelihoods has further underlined the importance of the jobs agenda.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaped the global economy for over two years, with persisting negative economic and jobs impacts. These effects have so far prevented a full and balanced recovery of labor markets and will also affect a future generation of workers.

Governments have responded quickly to address the immediate jobs challenges of COVID-19, by using:

(i) liquidity support for firms,

(ii) wage subsidies to retain jobs; and

(iii) income support for the unemployed and vulnerable households.

But they need to continue to address the medium and long-term effects of the pandemic by stimulating job creation, re-employment, and economic inclusion. And they’ll have to do so in a world beset by disruptive technological change and shifting patterns of demand.

There is an urgent need to strengthen health and social protection systems to provide robust universal coverage and reduce their dependence on financing through labor taxes, which creates disincentives to the growth of better jobs.

Jobs Impacts of COVID-19 Blog Series

Knowledge and Research for Solutions

As well as supporting the implementation of established good practices, we also mobilize global knowledge and support cutting-edge research on jobs challenges such as:

How to promote private investment and firms’ growth (especially in labor-intensive sectors);
How to link independent producers to product and financial markets so they can raise their productivity and earnings;
How to reform social protection systems to cover informal workers and reduce barriers to the growth of formal jobs;
How to support well-managed domestic and international labor mobility toward places with higher jobs potential; and,
How to help disadvantaged groups to get the skills and jobs they need, through improved training systems and active labor market policies.

Knowledge and Research