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Working From Home Under COVID-19: Who Is Affected? Evidence From Latin American and Caribbean Countries

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  • Delaporte, Isaure
  • Peña, Werner

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Delaporte, Isaure & Peña, Werner, 2020. "Working From Home Under COVID-19: Who Is Affected? Evidence From Latin American and Caribbean Countries," GLO Discussion Paper Series 528, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:glodps:528
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Dingel, Jonathan I. & Neiman, Brent, 2020. "How many jobs can be done at home?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 189(C).
    2. Charles Gottlieb & Jan Grobovsek & Markus Poschke, 2020. "Working from Home across Countries," Cahiers de recherche 07-2020, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ.
    3. -, 2020. "Latin America and the Caribbean and the COVID-19 pandemic: Economic and social effects," Libros y Documentos Institucionales, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), number 45351 edited by Eclac.
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    Keywords

    COVID-19; Teleworking; Employment; Demographics;
    All these keywords.

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