One Ladder Does Not Fit All: Jobs and Poverty Transitions Across the Globe

Maurizio Bussolo, Ivan Torre and Hernan Winkler

No 11487, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Jobs are the primary driver of movements into and out of poverty, yet which kinds of employment transitions are most closely associated with a household’s escape from poverty remains poorly understood. Assembling harmonized longitudinal household surveys for 41 countries that span the full range of development, we estimate the association of poverty exit, poverty entry, and welfare growth with changes in the allocation of a household’s working-age members across wage employment, employer status, and agricultural and non-agricultural self-employment. The welfare gain associated with wage work rises steeply with development while the return to non-agricultural self-employment falls, so that the two reverse rank: in the poorest economies a shift into self-employment is associated with escaping poverty at least as strongly as a shift into wage work, whereas in the richest only wage employment is. A sharp asymmetry separates the two margins of poverty: the composition of a household’s employment predicts whether it climbs out, but access to almost any type of employment predicts whether it avoids falling in. In the poorest and richest economies alike, women’s employment transitions are as strongly, if not more, associated to escaping and avoiding poverty than men’s job transitions.

Date: 2026-10-21
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/0995560 ... 838-c04cac0158d8.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11487

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().