This new blog series presents and deepens key global findings from the Jobs Group of the World Bank on Jobs and Structural Change in the context of Jobs Diagnostics. Our aim is to better inform practitioners, such as those in our community of practitioners, so that they can develop country-specific strategies for jobs and economic transformation.
The unifying theme behind this series is that workers benefit from economic growth when they enter the labor force and find a job, get better at the jobs they already hold, or move to better, higher-productivity jobs. The links between jobs, structural change, and economic transformation are easier to understand when we identify the transitions that people make into the workforce and in the type of work they do, as the economy grows and transforms.
The blogs adopt the World Bank’s Jobs Diagnostic approach, which uses a guided inquiry to analyze how the structure of economies changes over time. The inquiry investigates how jobs and work are evolving, who gets them, and what facilitates and constrains workers in making transitions in the work they do, as the economy grows.
Jobs Diagnostics analyze labor demography, dependency ratios, sectoral patterns of production and employment and labor productivity, the education of the workforce, and returns to education. They analyze workers’ transitions from school to work, from unemployment to employment, and back into the workforce, and the changing pattern of occupations across sectors for different groups of workers over time. In some countries, Jobs Diagnostics analyze business dynamics to identify which firms create what type of jobs. Over 40 are completed and underway in the Bank, and the Jobs Group has created global data and tools that analyze episodes of economic transformation and job creation across countries.