Graciana Rucci

Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Career Choices for Young Workers in Latin America

We follow Almeida and Carneiro (2012) to assess the importance of labor market institutions. In particular, we incorporate the authors’ preferred measure of enforcement – the number of inspections per 100 firms in each municipality in 2002 –, into our analysis. There are 3.2 inspections per 100 firms in the average Brazilian municipality, and we split the sample at the median, into ’more’ and ’less’ regulated municipalities. We estimate the returns to experience and tenure following our outlined empirical strategy, separately for each sample (the results remain robust to a linear interaction in the number of inspections per municipality). We control for time-varying municipality characteristics, including population and income per capita, as well as state-level fixed effects, effectively exploiting within-state differences in enforcement. Within our framework, we expect that the returns to both experience and tenure should be higher in more regulated cities. We present the results in Table R1. While the returns to experience do not vary across the number of inspections, we find evidence of higher returns to tenure in municipalities with more inspections, fitting in with our cross-country comparison. As such, this result provides additional suggestive evidence that firms in more regulated labor markets face additional incentives to provide specific human capital.

Public Financing of Vocational Training through Competitive Funds: A Promising Option for Latin America and the Caribbean

The objective of this Technical Note is to describe the way competitive funds operate, based on examples from developed countries. The ultimate goal is to inform and guide its possible design and implementation in Latin American and Caribbean countries. The selected examples offer interesting contrasts due to the heterogeneity of their design, objectives and operation. In addition, these are new funds that were recently designed by the respective governments, with the purpose of introducing improvements in public policies for financing job training. The document is divided into two sections. In the first section, a conceptual framework is presented which seeks to understand the benefits of competitive funds to finance training. In the second section, specific examples are described: three projects in developed countries (New Zealand, United Kingdom and Michigan State in the United States) and one in a small developing economy, Barbados. Finally, the last section presents conclusions and identifies the challenges to be considered.

Guide to Workforce Skills Assessment Instruments

This guide reviews the principal instruments and surveys developed for assessing workforce skills. Its main objective is to consolidate the existing information and provide an overview of the different types of instruments available. It is also intended to help readers understand and navigate the vast universe of surveys and instruments for assessing skills in adults. For each instrument, it presents a general description, comparisons with other instruments of the same type, and an analysis of its applicability to the region.