Person:
Paci, Pierella

Office of the Vice-President, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network

Fields of Specialization

Poverty; inequality; labor; jobs; gender

Departments

Office of the Vice-President, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

In her 15-year career at the World Bank Group, Ms. Paci has held technical, operational and management positions and she has been instrumental in developing the corporate agenda on jobs, migration, gender and inequality. Prior to joining the World Bank, she was Associate Professor of Economics at City University (London) and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex (UK). She has written extensively in the areas of labor economics, gender economics, inequality and poverty, jobs, and human development.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 24

Does Employment Generation Really Matter for Poverty Reduction?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-12) Gutierrez, Catalina ; Orecchia, Carlo ; Paci, Pierella ; Serneels, Pieter

This paper analyzes how the employment/productivity profile of growth and its sectoral pattern are correlated with poverty reduction. The authors use a sample of 104 short-run growth spells in developing countries, between 1980 and 2001. They also identify some conditions of the labor market and the economic environment that are associated with employment-intensive growth or specific sectoral growth. The results show that, in the short run, although the aggregate employment-rate intensity of growth does not matter for poverty reduction any more than the aggregate productivity intensity of growth, the sectoral pattern of employment growth and productivity growth is important. Employment-intensive growth in the secondary sector is associated with decreases in poverty, while employment-intensive growth in agriculture is correlated with poverty increases. Similarly, productivity-intensive growth in agriculture is associated with decreases in poverty. Although the study does not address causality, coincidence of these phenomena in this large sample of heterogeneous countries and periods suggests that, in the short run, the sectoral productivity and employment pattern of growth may have important implications for poverty alleviation. Therefore, policies for reducing poverty should not overlook the sectoral productivity and employment implications of different growth policies.
Economic Growth, Income Distribution, and Poverty in Poland During Transition

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-12) Paci, Pierella ; Sasin, Martin J. ; Verbeek, Jos

The authors attempt to analyze the linkages between macroeconomic policies and economic growth variables, their movement over time, and their impact on poverty in the case of Poland. Poland, a middle-income country, is of particular interest because its data sources allow for a relatively detailed analysis of such developments, and the macroeconomic environment and the economic growth variables show a relatively sizable degree of variance. In addition, Poland has struggled in the past few years to reduce poverty while still experiencing positive economic growth. The authors show that in Poland, poverty-reducing growth depends heavily on the ability of the economy to generate jobs. During the early years of transition, net job growth was positive, while after the Russian crisis of 1998, productivity gains were accomplished mostly through labor shedding, henceforth, increasing poverty in Poland. In addition, the authors identify how fiscal and social protection policies affect income distribution and poverty in Poland.
Working through the Crisis : Jobs and Policies in Developing Countries during the Great Recession

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014) Banerji, Arup ; Newhouse, David ; Paci, Pierella ; Robalino, David ; Banerji, Arup ; Newhouse, David ; Paci, Pierella ; Robalino, David

This book looks back both at how the Great Recession affected employment outcomes in developing countries and at how governments responded. The chapters bring together a unique compilation of data and analysis from very different sources, including an inventory of policies implemented during the crisis among countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. The overall story is that the impacts of the crisis varied considerably. The effect depended on the size of the original shock, the channels through which it was manifested, the structure of institutions in the country -- especially labor institutions -- and the specific policy responses undertaken by countries in response to the shock. While these factors led outcomes to differ across the countries studied, a few common patterns emerged. In terms of impacts, overall adjustments involved reductions in earnings growth rather than employment growth, although the quality of employment was also affected. Youth were doubly affected, being more likely to both experience unemployment and reduced wages. Men seemed to have been more strongly affected than women. In most countries where data are available, there were no major differences between skilled and unskilled workers or those living in urban or rural areas. In terms of policy responses, this crisis was characterized by a high prevalence of active interventions in the labor market and the expansion of income protection systems, as well as countercyclical stimulus. Countercyclical stimulus measures in a number of countries, when timed well and sufficiently large to mitigate the shock, were effective in reducing adverse employment effects. Specific sectoral stimulus policies also had positive effects when well-targeted. But social protection and labor market policy responses were often ad-hoc and not in line with the types of adjustments that were taking place. As a result, these policies and programs did not necessarily reach those who needed them the most and typically were biased toward formal sector workers. In retrospect, there is a sense that developing countries were not well prepared to deal with the effects of the Great Recession, suggesting room for important reforms to social protection and labor policies moving forward.
Lessons Learned and Not Yet Learned from a Multicountry Initiative on Women's Economic Empowerment

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014) Johansson de Silva, Sara ; Paci, Pierella ; Posadas, Josefina

The Results-Based Initiatives (RBI), launched in 2007, were a pioneering attempt to provide comprehensive, coherent, and rigorous evidence on effective interventions to foster the economic empowerment of women. The RBI comprised five small pilots with built-in impact evaluation designed to identify what works best in promoting better outcomes for women as entrepreneurs, wage earners or farmers, under different country contexts. The program was an innovative experiment in an important policy area. While there is a clear rationale for policy interventions to help remove constraints to women’s economic empowerment, knowledge of what interventions work best in different settings remains limited. When the RBI were conceived, rigorous evidence in this area was close to nonexistent because no systematic impact evaluations had been carried out in developing countries. However, the RBI fell short of meeting several of their ambitious objectives. This study highlights lessons from the RBI with respect to both the impact of the interventions and dos and don’ts in the design and implementation of pilots. Regarding the impact on economic opportunities, the interventions did not generally increase women’s earnings, with the exception of the Peru pilot. However, women who received training generally appreciated the access to new information and felt their skills and their involvement in business associations and networks had increased. However, it would be wrong to conclude that these interventions were not effective. The lack of robust positive impact may be due to the evaluations being conducted too soon to show fully the long-term effects of the interventions, or to problems in the design, implementation, or measurement of pilot outcomes. In particular, there was a clear need of an “early warning system” to synchronize the corrections in the interventions with the design of the impact evaluation. The RBI were overambitious regarding what could be achieved with a limited budget and a short time frame.
Causes of Inequality in Health : Who Are You? Where You Live? Or Who Your Parents Were?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-11) Wagstaff, Adam ; Paci, Pierella ; Joshi, Heather

Data from the British National Child Development Study show that, among 33-year-olds, ill health (as measured by cardinalized responses to a question on self-assessed health) is concentrated among the worse off. The authors seek to decompose the inequalities in health status into their socioeconomic causes. In this decomposition, inequalities in health status depend on inequalities in each of the underlying determinants of health and on the elasticities of health status with respect to each of these determinants. The authors estimate these elasticities using regression models that allow for unobserved heterogeneity at the community level. They find that inequalities in unobserved community-level influences account for only 6 percent of health inequality, and inequalities in parental education and social class for only 4 percent. Inequalities in income and housing tenure account for most health inequality, though inequalities in educational attainment and in math scores at age seven also play a part.
Working toward Better Pay : Earning Dynamics in Ghana and Tanzania

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-05-29) Falco, Paolo ; Kerr, Andrew ; Paci, Pierella ; Rijkers, Bob

Improving access to productive employment is a key policy challenge, especially in low-income countries (LICs), where the only asset in abundance is labor. Building on ongoing research on earnings mobility, this study uses unusually rich longitudinal data from Ghana and Tanzania to identify engines of, and barriers to, earnings and earnings mobility. It examines the role of individual characteristics such as gender, age, and skills and characteristics of the job, but it also focuses on the role of job switches for example, moves into and out of self-employment. It zooms in particularly on the drivers of transitions between low-paying and high-paying jobs, and addresses questions such as whether being low paid is a transitory or permanent phenomenon, and whether it has a scarring effect on an individual's employment prospects. The extent to which earnings dynamics differ for women and young adults is also discussed in detail. The cross-country comparison of earnings dynamics and labor market transitions helps shed light on the institutional factors that promote labor market mobility and entrepreneurship. The report is organized as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two presents a brief review of related literature. Chapter three gives a descriptive overview of the labor markets in the two countries. Chapter four examines the determinants of earnings levels. Chapter five examines determinants of earnings growth. Chapter six focuses on low-pay and high-pay transitions and analyzes whether the experience of being in a low-paying job undermines an individual's future earnings prospects. Chapter seven discusses key policy implications.
A Checklist to Avoid Pilot Failures : Lessons from a Set of Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiatives

(Taylor and Francis, 2014-10-09) Johansson de Silva, Sara ; Paci, Pierella ; Posadas, Josefina

Pilot programs have gained significance in donor-supported development interventions because of the growing emphasis on measuring impact. The Results-based initiatives (RBI) were conceived as pioneering pilots expected to acquire rigorous evidence on effective interventions to foster women’s economic empowerment. However, they fell short of providing clear or generalizable conclusions on women’s economic empowerment due to design and implementation problems. The RBI nevertheless offer important lessons on common traps in pilot design and implementation. This article synthesizes 10 lessons from the RBI as a checklist to avoid pilot failure, intended for practitioners in any area of development.
Poverty Reduction in Ghana—Progress and Challenges: Overview

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10) Molini, Vasco ; Paci, Pierella

Ghana over the past two decades has enjoyed steady and robust growth, mainly through a modification in its economic structure: as the economy gradually shifted out of agriculture and into services, the country experienced noticeable advances in productivity. Agriculture's share of value added to GDP has declined at a faster rate since 2005, whereas the share of services has remained virtually unchanged. Employment has adjusted in line with the changes in the structure of the economy, with a progressive shift from the country side to urban areas. However, many challenges remain, in particular the fairly high share of the population still living in poverty and the persistent gender gaps in productive activities.
Structural Transformation, Productivity, and Employment in Ghana 1991-2012

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10) Paci, Pierella ; Pavelesku, Dan

Ghana’s recent economic growth was accompanied by significant structural transformation. Over the past two decades Ghana has enjoyed sustained economic growth combined with some degree of transformation away from agriculture. This shift was associated with a considerable increase in the relative share of services. In recent years, the industry share of GDP has also picked up although the growth of employment in that sector has been comparatively slow.
Understanding the Impact of Economic Shocks on Labor Market Outcomes in Developing Countries : An application to Indonesia and Mexico

( 2010-04-01) Gutierrez, Catalina ; Paci, Pierella ; Park, Beom S.

In this paper the authors use a search and matching model of multi-sector labor markets, to understand the channels through which economic shocks affect labor market outcomes in developing countries. In the model workers can be employed in agriculture, formal or informal urban jobs, or unemployed. Economic shocks are manifested as either increased turbulence in the formal/informal sectors or a decrease in overall sectoral productivity. By calibrating the model to Indonesia and Mexico, the authors are able to understand how the 1998 Indonesian crisis and the 2001 Mexican recession translated into labor market outcomes. They then venture to simulate how the current financial crisis might affect the allocation of labor and earnings across sectors, in these countries. The results suggest that in both countries past crises have increased the degree of turbulence of the formal sector, increasing job destruction. However, while in Indonesia the crisis affected the overall formal sector productivity, this was not the case in Mexico. This explains the larger blow to formal wages -- relative to the size of the shock- witnessed by Indonesian workers. The response of the informal sector was also different: In both countries the informal sector was able to act as a buffer, as relative earnings increased. However, while in Mexico it became much harder to find informal sector opportunities and easier to keep the job once found; in Indonesia turbulence in the informal sector increased substantially increasing the job destruction rate of informal jobs and limiting the cushioning role that the informal sector might have played. The agricultural sector was spared from the shock in both countries. In Indonesia, it actually benefited from an unusual exogenous increase in the price of rise. The simulations show that if either the informal or agricultural sectors are spared from the shocks, large reallocations of labor might occur, and the overall effect of the shock is smaller. Instead, if these sectors can t buffer the shock, the reallocation of labor is much smaller, but earnings in the formal sector drop substantially. The authors also explore the impact of alternative policies. They find that in relatively flexible markets where informality can be seen more as a choice rather than as queuing, unemployment benefits and informal employment subsidies may have paradoxical effects, by discouraging formal search. Instead, policies targeted at creating informal employment and boosting formal TFP growth have the desired effects.