How Did the COVID-19 Crisis Affect Different Types of Workers in the Developing World?

Abstract

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.

Women in Paid Employment: A Role for Public Policies and Social Norms in Guatemala

“…Even though our sample only covers data up to 2018, the impact of COVID-19 raises an even gloomier scenario for FLFP in Guatemala. Globally, women suffer larger work stoppage rates than men (Alon et al, 2021;Kugler et al, 2021). Estimates for Guatemala indicate that women were 20 percentage points more likely than men to lose their jobs in the early stages of the pandemic (Cucagna and Romero, 2021).…”

The Welfare Implications of COVID-19 for Fragile and Conflict-Affected Areas

“…To combat the pandemic, governments introduced restrictions to socioeconomic activity, and individuals adopted social distancing and modified their behavior in various other ways. As past studies have shown (for example, Bundervoet, Dávalos & Garcia, 2021;Crossley, Fisher & Low, 2021;Egger et al, 2021, Kugler et al, 2021, impacts both across countries and within countries have substantial heterogeneity. In this paper, we investigate the existence of differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on subnational areas based on their fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) status.…”

Childcare, COVID-19 and Female Firm Exit: Impact of COVID-19 School Closure Policies on Global Gender Gaps in Business Outcomes

“…the gendered economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic that shows the employment shock from the pandemic disproportionately impacted women (Kugler et al, 2021;Oreffice and Quintana-Domeque, 2021) and women-led firms (Torres et al, 2021;Liu, Wei and Xu, 2021).…”