Person:
Yemtsov, Ruslan

Global Practice on Social Protection and Labor, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Social protection

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Global Practice on Social Protection and Labor, The World Bank

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

Ruslan Yemtsov is a Lead Economist and Team Leader for social safety nets in the World Bank Social Protection and Labor Global practice. Prior to his current position, he worked as a poverty economist in the Middle East and North Africa region, and in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region. His experience includes: preparing poverty assessments (Egypt, Georgia, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and more than a dozen others), working on targeting and social assistance projects (Morocco, Russia, Croatia), fuel subsidy reform dialogue (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco) and leading regional flagship reports on poverty, subsidy reforms and statistical capacity. He has also worked on operations focused on food crisis response (Djibouti), structural adjustment credits (Georgia), energy sector reform, social funds, and social welfare development projects. He is the author and co-author of over 20 research papers, articles and book chapters.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 22

Social Protection, Poverty and the Post-2015 Agenda

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05) Fiszbein, Ariel ; Kanbur, Ravi ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

Social protection is absent from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and only recently has gained some prominence in the post-2015 discourse. In the past quarter century, however, rising inequality has often accompanied economic growth. At the same time, the growing importance of risk and vulnerability on the wellbeing of the poor has been recognized. Further, there is now a consensus on adopting more ambitious goals on poverty reduction. Defining social protection as a collection of programs that address risk, vulnerability, inequality and poverty through a system of transfers in cash or in kind, this paper argues that social protection needs to be on the post-2015 agenda as a key element of the discourse. It provides an empirical overview of social protection around the world based on the World Bank's Atlas of Social Protection: Indicators of Resilience and Equity (ASPIRE) data set. Focusing on the goal of ending poverty, the paper estimates that social protection programs are currently preventing 150 million people from falling into poverty. Based on the data set, the paper develops, tentatively and for discussion, a set of candidate goals, indicators and targets for the acceleration of poverty reduction through social protection. The authors ask what it would take for social protection programs to contribute to halving the poverty gap in a country. They show that if all countries could achieve the actual poverty reduction efficiency already observed in the top quartile of countries, then 70 percent of the countries in the sample could achieve this goal. However, for 30 percent of the countries, even reaching the top quartile on efficiency will not be enough -- for these countries, the issue is one of budgetary adequacy.
How Can Safety Nets Contribute to Economic Growth?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05) Alderman, Harold ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

The paper provides an up-to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is organized into 4 distinct pathways: i) encouraging asset accumulation by changing incentives and by addressing imperfections in financial markets caused by constraints in obtaining credit, and from information asymmetries; overcoming such failures helps households to invest into their human capital or productive assets; ii) failures in insurance markets especially in low income setting; safety nets are assisting in managing risk both ex post and ex ante; iii) safety nets are overcoming failure to create assets and other local economy complementary factors to household-level investments; iv) safety nets are shown to relax political constraints on policy. Safety nets have a dual objective of directly alleviating poverty through transfers to the poor and of triggering higher growth for the poor. However, the trade-off between the dual objectives of equity and growth is not eliminated by the potential for productive safety nets; this remains critical for designing social policies.
Has Rural Infrastructure Rehabilitation in Georgia Helped the Poor?

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-08-31) Lokshin, Michael ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

This article proposes a research strategy to deal with the scarcity of data on beneficiaries for conducting impact assessments of community-level projects. Community-level panel data from a regular household survey augmented with a special community module are used to measure the impact of projects. Propensity score-matched difference in-difference comparisons are used to control for time-invariant unobservable factors. This methodology takes into consideration the purposeful placement of projects and their interactions at the community level. This empirical approach is applied to infrastructure rehabilitation projects, for schools, roads, and water supply systems, in rural Georgia between 1998 and 2001. The analysis produces plausible results regarding the size of welfare gains from a particular project at the village level and allows for differentiation of benefits between the poor and the non-poor. The findings of this study can contribute to evaluations of the impact of infrastructure interventions on poverty by bringing new empirical evidence to bear on the welfare and equity implications.
Evaluating the Impact of Infrastructure Rehabilitation Projects on Household Welfare in Rural Georgia

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-10) Lokshin, Michael ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

The authors evaluate the effect of various community level infrastructure rehabilitation projects undertaken in rural Georgia on household well-being. Their analysis is based on combining household and community level survey data. The authors' empirical approach uses the panel structure of the data to control for time-invariant un-observables at the community level by applying propensity-score-matched double difference comparison. The results indicate that improvements in school and road infrastructure produce nontrivial welfare gains for the poor at the village and country levels. The impact of water rehabilitation projects is ambiguous. School rehabilitation projects produce the largest gains for the poor. The methodological lesson from this analysis is that ad hoc community surveys matched with ongoing nationally representative surveys can provide a feasible and low cost impact evaluation tool.
Household Strategies for Coping with Poverty and Social Exclusion in Post-Crisis Russia

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-02) Lokshin, Michael M. ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

What strategies have Russian households used, to cope with economic hardship in the wake of recent financial crisis? Which coping strategies have been most effective in reducing poverty for different groups of households? And how have people been able to adapt to the dramatic drop in formal cash incomes? The authors look at these questions using subjective evaluations of coping strategies used by household survey respondents to mitigate the effects of the Russian financial crisis on their welfare. The data come from two rounds (1996 and 1998) of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. The results of their analysis show that a household's choice of survival strategy, strongly depends on its human capital: the higher its level of human capital, the more likely it is to choose an active strategy (such as finding a supplementary job, or increasing home production). Households with low levels of human capital, those headed by pensioners, and those whose members have low levels of education, are more likely to suffer social exclusion. To prevent poverty from becoming entrenched, the trend toward marginalization, and impoverishment of these groups of households, needs to be monitored, and targeted policy interventions need to be undertaken to reverse the trend.
Income Support for the Poorest : A Review of Experience in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-06-26) Tesliuc, Emil ; Pop, Lucian ; Grosh, Margaret ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

Most countries in the world aspire to protect poorest and most vulnerable families from destitution and thus provide some type of income support to those who are very poor. These programs are often layered into social policy along with other transfers, subsidies, or services. The way to best provide such last-resort income support (LRIS) and its role in wider social policy is a matter of some complexity, much experimentation, and much study. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 28 of 30 countries operate LRIS programs. This study examines the experience of LRIS programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It documents the outcomes of such programs throughout the region in terms of expenditure, coverage, targeting, and simulated effects on poverty and inequality. For a subset of countries, the study documents and draws lessons from the design and implementation arrangements - institutional frameworks and administrative structures, eligibility determination, benefits and conditions, governance mechanisms, and administrative costs on the basis of information gleaned during in-depth country engagements that have extended a decade or more (Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, the Kyrgyz Republic, Lithuania, and Romania) and other detailed work available from newer or more specific engagements (Croatia, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan). The report is organized as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two provides an overview of the role of LRIS in the wider social assistance policies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Chapter three looks into the institutional and financing arrangements of the LRIS programs in the case study countries. Chapter four covers one of the two most charged issues in narrowly targeted LRIS programs - how eligibility is determined. Chapter five takes up the other charged issue in these programs - the benefit formula and how labor disincentives can be held in check with the guaranteed minimum income design. Chapter six focuses on two key elements of control and accountability systems in LRIS programs - modern management information systems and strategies to reduce error, fraud, and corruption. Chapter seven examines the administrative costs of the LRIS programs in the case study countries. Chapter eight highlights and summarizes the lessons.
How Can Safety Nets Contribute to Economic Growth?

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2014-01-23) Alderman, Harold ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

The paper provides an up-to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is organized into four distinct pathways: i) encouraging asset accumulation by changing incentives and by addressing imperfections in financial markets caused by constraints in obtaining credit, and from information asymmetries; overcoming such failures helps households to invest into their human capital or productive assets; ii) failures in insurance markets especially in low income setting; safety nets are assisting in managing risk both ex post and ex ante; iii) safety nets are overcoming failure to create assets and other local economy complementary factors to household-level investments; iv) safety nets are shown to relax political constraints on policy. Safety nets have a dual objective of directly alleviating poverty through transfers to the poor and of triggering higher growth for the poor. However, the trade-off between the dual objectives of equity and growth is not eliminated by the potential for productive safety nets; this remains critical for designing social policies.
Towards More Effective Social Assistance in Russia: An Update of the System Performance Considering New National Target of Halving Poverty by 2024

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06-24) Yemtsov, Ruslan ; Posarac, Aleksandra ; Nagernyak, Maria ; Albegova, Irina

This report updates the assessment of the performance of the social protection (SP) system in Russia, using the 2014-2017 rounds of the Survey on Incomes and the Participation in Social Programs (VNDN in Russian) by the State Statistic Service of the Russian Federation (Rosstat), the largest household annual monitoring survey in Russia, and the main source of official data on poverty. The 2017 VNDN Survey round has a sample (about 150,000 households) that is 3 times larger than its standard sample size and it allows for a comprehensive assessment of the SP system performance both at the national and the regional levels. The context for the update is the 2018 May Decree by the President of Russia5, which defined the new strategic goals for socio-economic development and poverty alleviation in Russia. The Decree put human development and poverty reduction at the center of the Russia’s development strategy over the medium term. To achieve the May decree goals by 2024, the Government developed 12 National Projects, particularly in health, support to families and education, and allocated significant resources for their implementation. The national goals include halving poverty, increasing the quality of education and improving health status to extend longevity and economically active life. For social protection, the objectives pertain to higher efficiency and effectiveness, greater share of resources directed to families in need of assistance, better performance results and stronger alignment with human development goals. More recently, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection launched a series of regional pilots to inform decisionmakers on good practice examples in implementing the reform in the regions. This update is intended to feed into this on-going process, enabling the World Bank team to continue to support the Government of the Russian Federation in its efforts to improve efficacy of its social assistance system. Through the RAS project, the social assistance team of the World Bank has established itself as credible source of robust analysis and solid technical advice.
Was Growth in Egypt Between 2005 and 2008 Pro-Poor? From Static to Dynamic Poverty Profile

( 2011-03-01) Marotta, Daniela ; Yemtsov, Ruslan ; El-Laithy, Heba ; Abou-Ali, Hala ; Al-Shawarby, Sherine

This paper presents a detailed picture of how sustained growth in Egypt over 2005-2008 affected different groups both above and below the poverty line. This analysis, based on the Household Income, Expenditure and Consumption Panel Survey conducted by Egypt s national statistical agency, compares the changes in the static poverty profiles (based on growth incidence curves on a cross-section of data) with poverty dynamics (relying on panel data, growth incidence curves and transition matrices). The two approaches yield contrasting results: the longitudinal analysis reveals that growth benefited the poor while the cross-sectional analysis shows that the rich benefitted even more. The paper also shows the importance of going beyond averages to look at the trajectories of individual households. Panel data analysis shows that the welfare of the average poor household increased by almost 10 percent per year between 2005 and 2008, enough to move out of poverty. Conversely however, many initially non-poor households were exposed to poverty. As a matter of fact, only 45 percent of the population in Egypt remained consistently out of (near-) poverty throughout the period, while the remaining 55 percent of Egyptians experienced at least one (near-) poverty episode. This high mobility is not a statistical artefact: it reflects the actual process of growth. Taking high vulnerability into account is essential when designing policies to protect the poor and to ensure that growth is really inclusive.
Who Bears the Cost of Russia's Military Draft?

( 2008) Lokshin, Michael ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

In this paper, we use data from a large nationally representative survey in Russia to empirically estimate the distribution of the burden induced by the military draft. We focus on draft avoidance as a common response to the conscription system ridden by corruption. We develop a simple theoretical model that describes household compliance decisions with respect to enlistment as a function of its pre-draft welfare. We employ the full information maximum-likelihood instrumental variable model to estimate the effect of household characteristics on the probability of serving in the army. Our results indicate that the burden of conscription falls excessively on the poor. Poor, low-educated, rural households are much more likely to have their sons enlisted compared to urban, wealthy and better-educated families. Using the predicted probability of draft avoidance, we estimate the short-term direct economic cost of the draft as lost wages of serving conscripts. Our results suggest that losses incurred by the poor are disproportionately large and exceed the statutory rates of personal income taxes.