From Ghana to America: The Skill Content of Jobs and Economic Development

Bello, Salvatore Lo; Puerta, Maria Laura Sanchez; Winkler, Hernán

doi:10.1596/1813-9450-8758

Cited by 28 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Most of the existing efforts to estimate these figures rely on US-based measures of the type of tasks required by different occupations (Dingel & Neiman, 2020a;Avdiu & Nayyar, 2020;Mongey, Pilossoph, & Weinberg, 2020;Leibovici, Santacreu, & Famiglietti, 2020). 1 However, the task content of jobs exhibits substantial variation across countries (Lo Bello, Sanchez-Puerta, & Winkler, 2019;Hardy, Lewandowski, Park, & Yang, 2018). Differences in the organization of production or in the level of technology adoption across countries imply that the same occupation may be more intensive in face-to-face interactions or in physical tasks in poorer economies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jobs' Amenability to Working from Home: Evidence from Skills Surveys for 53 Countries

Hatayama¹,

Viollaz²,

Winkler³

2020

Self Cite

102

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The spread of COVID-19 and implementation of "social distancing" policies around the world have raised the question of how many jobs can be done at home. This paper uses skills surveys from 53 countries at varying levels of economic development to estimate jobs' amenability to working from home. The paper considers jobs' characteristics and uses internet access at home as an important determinant of working from home. The findings indicate that the amenability of jobs to working from home increases with the level of economic development of the country. This is driven by jobs in poor countries being more intensive in physical/manual tasks, using less information and communications technology, and having poorer internet connectivity at home. Women, college graduates, and salaried and formal workers have jobs that are more amenable to working from home than the average worker. The opposite holds for workers in hotels and restaurants, construction, agriculture, and commerce. The paper finds that the crisis may exacerbate inequities between and within countries. It also finds that occupations explain less than half of the variability in the working-from-home indexes within countries, which highlights the importance of using individual-level data to assess jobs' amenability to working from home.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jobs' Amenability to Working from Home: Evidence from Skills Surveys for 53 Countries

Hatayama¹,

Viollaz²,

Winkler³

2020

Self Cite

102

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…How has the skills intensity of occupations evolved in Ghana compared to in other countries? After transposing the STEP-based indexes task content of occupations onto various rounds of country surveys, Lo Bello, Puerta, and Winkler (2019) Source: World Bank 2017a; authors' estimates based on data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey 2016/17. Note: Priority sectors are ordered by size of employment in 2016/17.…”

Section: Box 3 Skills Intensity Of Occupations In Urban Ghana 2013 mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Source: Lo Bello et al 2019. Note: Each bar represents a change in the task content of occupations using STEP-based indexes per country.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural Transformation and Labor Market Performance in Ghana

Nxumalo¹,

Raju²

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…See also Hardy et al (2016) for evidence on the patterns in Central and Eastern European countries. Dicarlo et al (2016); Lewandowski et al (2019) and Lo Bello et al (2019) document differences in task content across countries with different levels of income per capita. of middle-skill RM jobs has stopped in recent years, and that the strong growth in the employment share of NRM jobs observed in the early part of the twenty-first century has sharply slowed down in recent years.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are routine jobs moving south? Evidence from changes in the occupational structure of employment in the US and Mexico

Cortés¹,

Morris²

2020

WIDER Working Paper

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The decline of employment in middle-wage, routine task intensive jobs has been well documented for the USA. Increased offshoring towards lower-income countries such as Mexico has been proposed as a potential driver of this decline. Our analysis provides a unique and new approach to address the question of whether trade and offshoring have impacted the occupational structure of employment in the USA by comparing the evolution of employment across 175 detailed occupational categories in both countries. We find that, with few exceptions, the occupations that have declined in the USA have also declined in Mexico. Industries with larger growth in imports from Mexico do not experience a decline in their routine employment share in the USA, nor do US industries that increase their use of Mexican intermediate inputs.There is therefore little evidence that US middle-wage jobs are moving south. The evidence is consistent with common shocks being primarily responsible for the decline of middle-wage jobs in both countries.

show abstract

From Ghana to America: The Skill Content of Jobs and Economic Development

Cited by 28 publications

References 22 publications

Jobs' Amenability to Working from Home: Evidence from Skills Surveys for 53 Countries

Jobs' Amenability to Working from Home: Evidence from Skills Surveys for 53 Countries

Structural Transformation and Labor Market Performance in Ghana

Are routine jobs moving south? Evidence from changes in the occupational structure of employment in the US and Mexico

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About