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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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: 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…