Scars of Pandemics from Lost Schooling and Experience: Aggregate Implications and Gender Differences Through the Lens of COVID-19

Roberto Samaniego (), Remi Jedwab, Paul M Romer and Asif Islam

No 9932, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Pandemic shocks disrupt human capital accumulation through schooling and work experience. This study quantifies the long-term economic impact of these disruptions in the case of COVID-19, focusing on countries at different levels of development and using returns to education and experience by college status that are globally estimated using 1,084 household surveys across 145 countries. The results show that both lost schooling and experience contribute to significant losses in global learning and output. Developed countries incur greater losses than developing countries, because they have more schooling to start with and higher returns to experience. The returns to education and experience are also separately estimated for men and women, to explore the differential effects by gender of the COVID-19 pandemic. Surprisingly, while the study uncovers gender differences in returns to education and schooling, gender differences in the impact of COVID-19 are small and short-lived, with a loss in female relative income of only 2.5 percent or less, mainly due to the greater severity of the employment shock on impact. These findings might challenge some of the ongoing narratives in policy circles. The methodology employed in this study is easily implementable for future pandemics.

Keywords: Educational Sciences; Employment and Unemployment; Public Health Promotion; Gender and Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/27767164 ... Lens-of-COVID-19.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Scars of Pandemics from Lost Schooling and Experience: Aggregate Implications and Gender Differences Through the Lens of COVID-19 (2022)
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:9932

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 ().