Does Birthplace Diversity Affect Economic Complexity? Cross-country Evidence
We empirically investigate the relationship between a country’s economic complexity and the diversity in the birthplaces of its immigrants. Our cross-country analysis suggests that countries with higher birthplace diversity by one standard deviation are more economically complex by 0.1 to 0.18 standard deviations above the mean. This holds particularly for diversity among highly educated migrants and for countries at intermediate levels of economic complexity. We address endogeneity concerns by instrumenting diversity through predicted stocks from a pseudo-gravity model as well as from a standard shift-share approach. Finally, we provide evidence suggesting that birthplace diversity boosts economic complexity by increasing the diversification of the host country’s export basket.
Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations
We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 60 percent more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the number of foreign inventors from other nations that specialize in those same technologies. For the average country in our sample, this number corresponds to only 25 inventors and a standard deviation of 135. We deal with endogeneity concerns by using historical migration networks to instrument for stocks of migrant inventors. Our results generalize the evidence of previous studies that show how migrant inventors “import” knowledge from their home countries, which translates into higher patenting in the receiving countries. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of migrants facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.
Profit Sharing, Industrial Upgrading, and Global Supply Chains: Theory and Evidence
This paper constructed a simple model to illustrate the global supply chain profit sharing and industrial upgrading mechanism, from which it was found that the average profitability distribution in the different supply chain stages was determined by two main factors: (1) the average product of the labor in the firms at each production stage; and (2) the ratio of the output elasticity of capital to the output elasticity of labor in each stage. This paper also proposed a new industrial upgrading mechanism, the ‘inter-supply chain upgrading’, for supply chain firms. Rises in production complexity and increased factor intensity in each production stage were found to be the two essential conditions for the inter-supply chain upgrading. The empirical study results were found to be broadly consistent with the proposed theories.
You Get What You Pay for: Sources and Consequences of the Public Sector Premium in Albania and Sri Lanka
We study the factors behind the public sector premium in Albania and Sri Lanka, the group heterogeneity in the premium, the sources of public sector wage compression, and the impact of this compression on the way individuals self-select between the public and the private sector. Similar to other countries, the public sectors in Albania and Sri Lanka pay higher wages than the private sector, for all but the most valued employees. While half of the premium of Sri Lanka and two-thirds of it in Albania are explained by differences in the occupation-education-experience mix between the sectors, and the level of private sector informality, the unexplained part of the premium is significant enough to affect the preferences of working in the public sector for different groups. We show that the compressed distributions of public sector wages and benefits create incentives for positive sorting into the public sector among most employees, and negative sorting among the most productive ones.
Listen to a podcast with author Ljubica Nedelkoska as she discusses the factors behind public sector wage premiums.
Automation, Skills Use and Training
This study focuses on the risk of automation and its interaction with training and the use of skills at work. Building on the expert assessment carried out by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne in 2013, the paper estimates the risk of automation for individual jobs based on the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The analysis improves on other international estimates of the individual risk of automation by using a more disaggregated occupational classification and identifying the same automation bottlenecks emerging from the experts’ discussion. Hence, it more closely aligns to the initial assessment of the potential automation deriving from the development of Machine Learning. Furthermore, this study investigates the same methodology using national data from Germany and United Kingdom, providing insights into the robustness of the results.
The risk of automation is estimated for the 32 OECD countries that have participated in the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) so far. Beyond the share of jobs likely to be significantly disrupted by automation of production and services, the accent is put on characteristics of these jobs and the characteristics of the workers who hold them. The risk is also assessed against the use of ICT at work and the role of training in helping workers transit to new career opportunities.
A Roadmap for Investment Promotion and Export Diversification: The Case of Jordan
Jordan faces a number of pressing economic challenges: low growth, high unemployment, rising debt levels, and continued vulnerability to regional shocks. After a decade of fast economic growth, the economy decelerated with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. From then onwards, various external shocks have thrown its economy out of balance and prolonged the slowdown for over a decade now. Conflicts in neighboring countries have led to reduced demand from key export markets and cut off important trade routes. Foreign direct investment, which averaged 12.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) between 2003-2009, fell to 5.1% of GDP over the 2010-2017. Regional conflicts have interrupted the supply of gas from Egypt – forcing Jordan to import oil at a time of record prices, had a negative impact on tourism, and also provoked a massive influx of migrants and refugees. Failure to cope with 50.4% population growth between led to nine consecutive years (2008-2017) of negative growth rates in GDP per capita, resulting in a cumulative loss of 14.0% over the past decade (2009-2018). Debt to GDP ratios, which were at 55% by the end of 2009, have skyrocketed to 94%.
Over the previous five years Jordan has undertaken a significant process of fiscal consolidation. The resulting reduction in fiscal impulse is among the largest registered in the aftermath of the Financial Crises, third only to Greece and Jamaica, and above Portugal and Spain. Higher taxes, lower subsidies, and sharp reductions in public investment have in turn furthered the recession. Within a context of lower aggregate demand, more consolidation is needed to bring debt-to-GDP ratios back to normal. The only way to break that vicious cycle and restart inclusive growth is by leveraging on foreign markets, developing new exports and attracting investments aimed at increasing competitiveness and strengthening the external sector. The theory of economic complexity provides a solid base to identify opportunities with high potential for export diversification. It allows to identify the existing set of knowhow, skills and capacities as signaled by the products and services that Jordan is able to make, and to define existing and latent areas of comparative advantage that can be developed by redeploying them. Service sectors have been growing in importance within the Jordanian economy and will surely play an important role in export diversification. In order to account for that, we have developed an adjusted framework that allows to identify the most attractive export sectors including services.
Based on that adjusted framework, this report identifies export themes with a high potential to drive growth in Jordan while supporting increasing wage levels and delivering positive spillovers to the non-tradable economy. The general goal is to provide a roadmap with key elements of a strategy for Jordan to return to a high economic growth path that is consistent with its emerging comparative advantages.
Migration and Post-conflict Reconstruction: The Effect of Returning Refugees on Export Performance in the Former Yugoslavia
During the early 1990s Germany offered temporary protection to over 700,000 Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many had been repatriated. We exploit this natural experiment to investigate the role of migrants in post-conflict reconstruction in the former Yugoslavia, using exports as outcome. Using confidential social security data to capture intensity of refugee workers to German industries–and exogenous allocation rules for asylum seekers within Germany as instrument—we find an elasticity of exports to return migration between 0.08 to 0.24. Our results are stronger in knowledge-intensive industries and for workers in occupations intensive in analytical and managerial skills.
Female Labor in Jordan: A Systematic Approach to the Exclusion Puzzle
Women in Jordan are excluded from labor market opportunities at among the highest rates in the world. Previous efforts to explain this outcome have focused on specific, isolated aspects of the problem and have not exploited available datasets to test across causal explanations. We develop a comprehensive framework to analyze the drivers of low female employment rates in Jordan and systematically test their validity, using micro-level data from Employment and Unemployment Surveys (2008-2018) and the Jordanian Labor Market Panel Survey (2010-2016). We find that the nature of low female inclusion in Jordan’s labor market varies significantly with educational attainment, and identify evidence for different factors affecting different educational groups. Among women with high school education or less, we observe extremely low participation levels and find the strongest evidence for this phenomenon tracing to traditional social norms and poor public transportation. On the higher end of the education spectrum – university graduates and above – we find that the problem is not one of participation, but rather of unemployment, which we attribute to a small and undiversified private sector that is unable to accommodate women’s needs for work and work-family balance.
Converge and European Value Chains: How Deep Integration Can Reignite Convergence in the EU
Convergence, the process by which poorer countries ‘catch-up’ to rich ones in terms of real incomes, is at the core of the promise of the European Union and the Eurozone. It was enshrined in the founding treaty of the EU and is at the center of policy-making today. However, after several decades of strong European growth, convergence across many core countries has come to a halt. Policymaking has focused on promoting greater integration between EU countries and in particular within the Eurozone to foster further convergence but the political gridlock has stopped these initiatives from moving forward.
Further economic and political integration is not necessary for, and may in fact be orthogonal to, greater convergence in the EU. EU countries have converged at roughly the same rate as non-EU countries since the 1950s, suggesting EU membership is not responsible for convergence. Further, there is no statistically significant difference in the rate of convergence between EA 12 or EA19 members before and after the introduction of the Euro. Finally, many current Eurozone members have converged in the last 10 years suggesting that the Euro structure does not impede convergence. Still, further integration may be desirable in the EU – not least to restore the union to its democratic ideals.
The only variable that is associated with greater convergence in European countries is value chain integration, particularly upstream integration. Upstream integration is domestic value added embodied in intermediate exports that are re-processed abroad. High upstream integration indicates strong participation in value chains and integration into regional production networks. The level of upstream integration varies tremendously within the EU, going from 10% of GDP in Spain to 28% of GDP in Estonia. Once we control for the level of upstream integration, the rate of converge in European countries goes from 1.25% to 4.5%.
High growth countries are deeply integrated in sub-regional supply chains within Europe. Europe is often thought of as a single supply chain but, in fact, there are several sub-regional supply chains within Europe. These sub-regional supply chains are based on strong bilateral ties between neighboring countries. Participation in one of these supply chains appears to matter more for growth than integration with any particular country (e.g. Germany) or to any specific region. Participation in these supply chains is independent of EU membership – it is due to historical ties and deliberate national policymaking.
The EU must put cross-country collaboration at the core Horizon Europe– its €100B mission driven innovation programme – to future-proof European supply chains and reintegrate lagging countries. Horizon Europe is the EU’s bet to become a global technology leader. Leading in technology involves not only innovation but also developing the supply chains of the future that allow innovation to be commercially successful. Horizon Europe will not succeed if innovation spending continues occur in national siloes as it did in the Horizon 2020 programme. The EU must pro-actively manage and integrate innovation efforts across the Union and ensure that commercialization occurs at the EU level. Only then can we hope to achieve both EU technological leadership and convergence within the EU.
Putting Global Governance in its Place
In a world economy that is highly integrated, most policies produce effects across the border. This is often believed to be an argument for greater global governance, but the logic requires scrutiny. There remains strong revealed demand for policy and institutional diversity among nations, rooted in differences in historical, cultural, or development trajectories. The canonical case for global governance is based on two set of circumstances. The first occurs when there is global public good (GPG) and the second under “beggar-thy-neighbor” (BTN) policies. However, the world economy is not a global commons, and virtually no economic policy has the nature of a global public good (or bad). And while there are some important BTN policies, much of our current discussions deal with policies that are not true BTNs. The policy failures that exist arise not from weaknesses of global governance, but from distortions of domestic governance. As a general rule, these domestic failures cannot be fixed through international agreements or multilateral cooperation. The paper closes by discussing an alternative model of global governance called “democracy-enhancing global governance.”