A new GLO Discussion Paper documents considerable variation in the potential to work from home across occupations, industries, regions and workers’ socioeconomic characteristics in Latin American and Caribbean Countries.
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GLO Discussion Paper No. 528, 2020
Working From Home Under COVID-19: Who Is Affected? Evidence From Latin American and Caribbean Countries – Download PDF
by Delaporte, Isaure & Peña, Werner
GLO Fellow Isaure Delaporte
Author Abstract: Millions of individuals are required to work from home as part of national efforts to fight COVID-19. To evaluate the employment impact of the pandemic, an important point is whether individuals are able to work from home. This paper estimates the share of jobs that can be performed at home in 23 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries as well as examines the workers’ characteristics associated with such jobs. To carry out this analysis, this paper uses rich harmonised household surveys and presents two measures of teleworkability. The first measure of the feasibility of working from home is borrowed from Dingel and Neiman (2020), while the second closely follows the methodology of Saltiel (2020). We use the second measure as our benchmark, as it is based on a more representative task content of occupations for LAC countries. We find that the share of individuals who are able to work from home varies from 7% in Guatemala to 16% in the Bahamas. We document considerable variation in the potential to work from home across occupations, industries, regions and workers’ socioeconomic characteristics. Our results show that some individuals are better positioned to cope with the current situation than others. This highlights the need to assist the most vulnerable workers in the context of the global pandemic.
The Journal of Population Economics welcomes submissions dealing with the demographic aspects of the Coronavirus Crisis. After fast refereeing, successful papers are published in the next available issue. An example:
Yun Qiu, Xi Chen & Wei Shi (2020): Impacts of Social and Economic Factors on the Transmission of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China, GLO Discussion Paper, No. 494.
REVISED DRAFT NOW forthcoming: Journal of Population Economics, Issue 4, 2020.
SEE FOR MORE DETAILS AND FREE ACCESS TO THE PREPUBLICATION REVISED DRAFT!
More from the GLO Coronavirus Cluster
GLO Discussion Papers are research and policy papers of the GLO Network which are widely circulated to encourage discussion. Provided in cooperation with EconStor, a service of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, GLO Discussion Papers are among others listed in RePEc (see IDEAS, EconPapers). Complete list of all GLO DPs – downloadable for free.
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