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.
We calculate statistics for each individual country using the household weights constructed by the World Bank and national statistics offices. The cross-country averages are calculated as simple averages between the 40 country-level values.The COVID-19 pandemic is the worst global macroeconomic shock since the Great Depression. This brief reports which groups of workers have been hit hardest by the jobs impact following the economic fallout of COVID-19 in developing countries. 1 It complements an earlier study by Khamis et al. ( 2021) that shows that the onset of the pandemic had major and pernicious adverse effects on the livelihoods of workers across about 40 developing countries. This brief reveals the following:• Larger shares of female, young, less educated, and urban workers stopped working, with gender differences being particularly pronounced. Although women work in different sectors than men, gender gaps in work stoppage stemmed mainly from differences within sectors rather than differential employment patterns across sectors.
This paper validates a recently proposed method to estimate intra-generational poverty transitions through repeated cross-sectional surveys. The technique allows the creation of a "synthetic panel" -done by predicting future or past household income or consumption using a set of simple modeling and error structure assumptions -and thus permits the estimation of lower and upper bounds of the joint distribution of poverty and non-poverty transitions. We validate the approach in three different settings where good panel data exist (Chile, Nicaragua, and Peru). In doing so, we also carry out a number of refinements to the validation procedure and expand the set of tests undertaken. The results are broadly encouraging in estimating the joint probabilities of poverty and non-poverty transitions between two periods in all three contexts. The approach is also robust to a broad Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article
This paper reviews the emerging literature on which jobs can be performed from home and presents new estimates of the prevalence of such jobs based on the task content of occupations, their technology requirements and the availability of internet access by country and income groupings. Globally, one of every five jobs can be performed from home. In low-income countries, this ratio drops to one of every 26 jobs. Failing to account for internet access yields upward biased estimates of the resilience of poor countries, lagging regions, and poor workers. Since better paid workers are more likely to be able to work from home, COVID-19 is likely to exacerbate inequality, especially in richer countries where better paid and educated workers are insulated from the shock. The overall labor market burden of COVID-19 is bound to be larger in poor countries, where only a small share of workers can work from home and social protection systems are weaker. Across the globe, young, poorly educated workers and those on temporary contracts are least likely to be able to work from home and more vulnerable to the labor market shocks from COVID-19.
The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.
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