Identification of an Expanded Inventory of Green Job Titles through AI-Driven Text Mining (Washington, DC: World Bank , 2024-09-19 ) Paliński, Michał; Aşık,Güneş, Güneş; Gajderowicz, Tomasz; Jakubowski, Maciej; Nas Özen , Efşan; Raju, Dhushyanth This study expands the inventory of green job titles by incorporating a global perspective and using contemporary sources. It leverages natural language processing, specifically a retrieval-augmented generation model, to identify green job titles. The process began with a search of academic literature published after 2008 using the official APIs of Scopus and Web of Science. The search yielded 1,067 articles, from which 695 unique potential green job titles were identified. The retrieval-augmented generation model used the advanced text analysis capabilities of Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4, providing a reproducible method to categorize jobs within various green economy sectors. The research clustered these job titles into 25 distinct sectors. This categorization aligns closely with established frameworks, such as the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network, and suggests potential new categories like green human resources. The findings demonstrate the efficacy of advanced natural language processing models in identifying emerging green job roles, contributing significantly to the ongoing discourse on the green economy transition.
Trade-offs in the Design of Simplified Tax Regimes (Washington, DC: World Bank , 2024-09-19 ) Hoy, Christopher; Scot, Thiago; Oguso, Alex; Custers, Anna; Zalo, Daniel; Doino, Ruggero; Karver, Jonathan; Orgeira Pillai, Nicolas This paper provides novel evidence of the trade-offs policy makers face when designing simplified tax regimes for small businesses. First, it provides a comprehensive stocktaking of the main features of these regimes across Sub-Saharan Africa: they are adopted by two-thirds of countries, but their design varies greatly. Second, it draws on administrative and survey data for a thorough examination of a specific simplified tax regime. This analysis shows most small businesses lack knowledge about design features, such as the existence of a minimum exemption threshold, but they react strongly to increases in tax rates by lowering their declared turnover. Finally, the paper presents the results of an experiment that encourages taxpayers to pay fixed amounts—a potential alternative design of a simplified tax regime that aims for a better balance of the trade-offs facing policy makers. The findings show that providing simple guidance about how much small businesses with similar characteristics typically pay in taxes can increase revenue, but this reduces equity among taxpayers.
Do Capital Incentives Distort Technology Diffusion? Evidence on Cloud, Big Data and AI (Washington, DC: World Bank , 2024-09-19 ) DeStefano, Timothy; Johnstone, Nick; Kneller, Richard; Timmis, Jonathan The arrival of cloud computing provides firms a new way to access digital technologies as digital services. Yet, capital incentive policies present in every OECD country are still targeted towards investments in informational technology (IT) capital. If cloud services are partial substitutes for IT investments, the presence of capital incentive policies may unintentionally discourage the adoption of cloud and technologies that rely on the cloud, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics. This paper exploits a tax incentive in the UK for capital investment as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the impact on firm adoption of cloud computing, big data analytics and AI. The empirical results find that the policy increased investment in IT capital as would be expected; but it slowed firm adoption of cloud, big data and AI. Matched employer-employee data shows that the policy also led firms to reduce their demand for workers that perform data analytics, but not other types of workers.
Women at Work (Washington, DC: World Bank , 2024-09-18 ) Devoto, Florencia; Galasso, Emanuela; Beegle, Kathleen; Brodmann, Stefanie In some developing countries, women’s labor force participation remains persistently low. This gives rise to questions regarding what types of employment opportunities or interventions can draw women into work in such contexts. In this study in urban Djibouti, with restrictive gender norms and very low female employment rates, women were randomly offered the opportunity to be employed in a public works program designed specifically to facilitate their participation. Program take-up is very high, and most participants do not delegate their work opportunity to another adult. However, in the medium term after the program ends, women who receive the temporary employment offer revert back to non participation in the labor market. These results suggest that while social norms can be a deterrent to women’s work in settings with very low employment rates, women will participate in work opportunities when they are offered and suitable.
Firm Networks and Global Technology Diffusion (Washington, DC: World Bank , 2024-09-13 ) Bastos, Paulo; Stapleton, Katherine; Taglioni, Daria; Wei, Hannah Yi This study examines the role of multinational firms and global value chain linkages in the cross-country diffusion of emerging technologies. The analysis combines detailed information on the near-universe of online job postings in 17 countries with data on multinational networks and firm-to-firm linkages from 2014 to 2022. Online job postings are utilized to investigate how jobs related to emerging technologies spread through firm networks. The findings show that emerging technology jobs are highly concentrated within multinational firms and their supply chains. Approximately one third of all emerging technology job postings during this period come from Fortune 500 firms, their affiliates, buyers, suppliers, or innovation partners. Although the locations where these technologies originate exhibit a higher prevalence of technology job openings, this advantage diminishes over time as diffusion accelerates in wealthier and geographically closer countries and regions. The study highlights the significant role of firm-to-firm linkages in technology diffusion, with some linkages proving more influential than others. Firms that were previously buyers or innovation partners of establishments in technology-originating locations experienced faster growth in jobs related to these technologies. Moreover, relationships outside corporate boundaries play a particularly critical role, and these connections are influential beyond the factor of geographical distance.