How High (Low) are the Possibilities of Teleworking in Mexico?

Abstract

We estimate that about 10.6 percent of jobs could be done from home in Mexico, using 468 4-digit SINCO occupations and employment data in 2019. This is roughly half the estimate reported by Dingel and Neiman (2020) using teleworking criteria devised for the U.S. labor market. Owing to the peculiarities of the Mexican labor market, we report results by type of contract (formal and informal), geographical area, and gender. We validate our teleworking measure by exploiting the cross-state variation of real GDP per worker, the share of services in employment, and internet and computer access within the household. We find that the gap in teleworking possibilities favorable to females has its root in the disparate occupation structures across gender. During the pandemic, the decline in the share of non-telework jobs in females has been thrice as much as that in males

Is work from home here to stay? Look from Mexico

“…In 2017/2018, three years ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the number of WFH employees in the USA was 25% (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). Leyva and Mora (2021) estimated this amount for Mexico before outbreak of the pandemic as 10.6% of officially employed population, based on information from Mexican National Social Security Institute (IMSS in Spanish). The concept of working outside a company's office is much broader than that of working at home.…”

Cambio técnico y empleo post-pandemia en México

“…Para aproximar el grado de exposición del empleo al cambio técnico en México, se utilizaron cuatro índices que miden características de las ocupaciones, que son: su probabilidad de automatización (Frey y Osborne, 2017), el contenido rutinario de sus tareas (Mihaylov y Tijdens, 2019), y dos índices sobre la viabilidad de que puedan desarrollarse en forma remota (Dingel y Neiman, 2020;Leyva y Mora, 2021). En el Anexo 1 se presentan los detalles metodológicos sobre la construcción de esos índices 21 .…”

Export collapse and employment effects during the Covid-19 crisis in Mexico

“…These manufacturing and service activities were also identified by the ILO (2020) as sectors of high risk of losing female jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic due to the high concentration of female workers and the export dependence of these activities. Considering that most manufacturing jobs cannot be performed remotely from the workplace, as suggested by Monroy-Gómez-Franco (2021b) and Leyva and Mora (2021). 7 Thus, female workers faced not only the challenge of not being able to work remotely during the pandemic but also that the export dependence of these activities has made them more vulnerable in the face of Covid-19 crisis.…”

“…These occupations tend to be concentrated in the high end of the income distribution and most manufacturing jobs are not among them. Leyva and Mora (2021) found that only 10.6% of jobs could have been done from home in 2019 in Mexico. Although in 2019 females would have had the best prospects to work from home (15.3 vs. 7.7% for males), the authors found that during the pandemic, teleworking has discriminated especially against women unable to work from home.…”