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

Abstract

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.

The impact of closing schools on working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence using panel data from Japan

“…The findings in Fig. 3 are consistent with the argument of Hatayama et al ( 2020 ) that women tend to have jobs that are more amenable to working from home than the average worker. However, within the same gender, there is remarkable difference in the work-from-home behavior according to whether citizens have children in primary school, although having children in junior high school did not make difference.…”

“…Part-time workers are more likely to lose their jobs than full-time workers, especially in emergency situations. Salaried and formal workers have jobs that are more amenable to working from home than the average workers (Hatayama et al 2020 ). To scrutinize the effect of having children who attend school, it is important to compare people that have similar jobs.…”

Wage Losses and Inequality in Developing Countries: Labor Market and Distributional Consequences of COVID-19 Lockdowns in Turkey

“…In less developed countries workers have fewer opportunities to work from home due to technological limitations as well as the industrial composition. For example, amenability of homeworking is decreased with the level of development since agricultural and other low productivity jobs are not possible to perform from home (Gottlieb et al, 2020;Hatayama et al, 2020). Hence, developing economies differ significantly from the advanced countries both in terms of the availability of occupations that can be teleworked and number of people employed in such jobs.…”

“…Hence, developing economies differ significantly from the advanced countries both in terms of the availability of occupations that can be teleworked and number of people employed in such jobs. Nevertheless, it has also been found that highly educated, well-paid and less vulnerable workers are typically concentrated in teleworkable jobs in developing and developed world (Delaporte and Rena, 2020;Hatayama et al, 2020).…”

“…These findings are mostly in line with other studies examining the characteristics that lead to higher teleworkability. It is affirmed that women, university educated and formal sector workers are more likely to have higher ability to work from home (Hatayama, 2020;Delaporte and Pena., 2020;Saltiel. 2020).…”