Shoring Up Economic Refugees: Venezuelan Migrants in the Ecuadoran Labor Market

Sergio Olivieri, Francesc Ortega, Ana Mercedes Rivadeneira Alava and Eliana Carranza

No 9332, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Ecuador became the third largest receiver of the 4.3 million Venezuelans who left their country in the last five years, hosting around 10 percent of them. Little is known about the characteristics of these migrants and their labor market outcomes. This paper fills this gap by analyzing a new large survey (EPEC). On average, Venezuelan workers are highly skilled and have high rates of employment, compared with Ecuadorans. However, their employment is of much lower quality, characterized by low wages and high rates of informality and temporality. Venezuelans have experienced significant occupational downgrading, relative to their employment prior to emigration. As a result, despite their high educational attainment, Venezuelans primarily compete for jobs with the least skilled and more economically vulnerable Ecuadoran workers. Our simulations suggest that measures that allow Venezuelans to obtain employment that matches their skills, such as facilitating the conversion of education credentials, would increase Ecuador's GDP between 1.6 and 1.9 percent and alleviate the pressure on disadvantaged native workers. We also show that providing work permits to Venezuelan workers would substantially reduce their rates of informality and increase their average earnings.

Keywords: Educational Sciences; Labor Markets; Rural Labor Markets; Indigenous Peoples Law; Indigenous Peoples; Indigenous Communities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/35482159 ... ran-Labor-Market.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Shoring up Economic Refugees: Venezuelan Migrants in the Ecuadorian Labor Market (2020)
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:9332

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 ().