03. Journals

1,616 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210

These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

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Income and Wealth Inequality in Hong Kong, 1981–2020: The Rise of Pluto-Communism?

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-10-08) Piketty, Thomas ; Yang, Li

The objective of this paper is to better understand the evolution and institutional roots of Hong Kong's growing economic inequality and political cleavages. By combining multiple sources of data (household surveys, fiscal data, wealth rankings, national accounts) and methodological innovations, two main findings are obtained. First, he evidence suggests a very large rise in income and wealth inequality in Hong Kong over the last four decades. Second, based on the latest opinion poll data, business elites, who carry disproportionate weight in Hong Kong's Legislative Council, are found to be more likely to vote for the pro-establishment camp (presumably to ensure that policies are passed that protect their political and economic interests). This paper argues that the unique alliance of government and business elites in a partially democratic political system is the plausible institutional root of Hong Kong's rising inequality and political cleavages.
Tackling psychosocial and capital constraints to alleviate poverty

(Springer Nature, 2022-04-27) Bossuroy, Thomas ; Goldstein, Markus ; Karimou, Bassirou ; Karlan, Dean ; Kazianga, Harounan ; Pariente, William ; Premand, Patrick ; Thomas, Catherine C. ; Udry, Christopher ; Vaillant, Julia ; Wright, Kelsey A.

Many policies attempt to help extremely poor households build sustainable sources of income. Although economic interventions have predominated historically 1,2, psychosocial support has attracted substantial interest 3,4,5, particularly for its potential cost-effectiveness. Recent evidence has shown that multi-faceted ‘graduation’ programs can succeed in generating sustained changes 6,7. Here we show that a multi-faceted intervention can open pathways out of extreme poverty by relaxing capital and psychosocial constraints. We conducted a four-arm randomized evaluation among extremely poor female beneficiaries already enrolled in a national cash transfer government program in Niger. The three treatment arms included group savings promotion, coaching and entrepreneurship training, and then added either a lump-sum cash grant, psychosocial interventions, or both the cash grant and psychosocial interventions. All three arms generated positive effects on economic outcomes and psychosocial well-being, but there were notable differences in the pathways and the timing of effects. Overall, the arms with psychosocial interventions were the most cost-effective, highlighting the value of including well-designed psychosocial components in government-led multi-faceted interventions for the extreme poor.
How much does reducing inequality matter for global poverty?

(Springer Nature, 2022-03-02) Lakner, Christoph ; Gerszon Mahler, Daniel ; Negre, Mario ; Prydz, Espen Beer

The goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and working towards a more equal distribution of incomes are part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Using data from 166 countries comprising 97.5 percent of the world’s population, we simulate scenarios for global poverty from 2019 to 2030 under various assumptions about growth and inequality. We use different assumptions about growth incidence curves to model changes in inequality and rely on a machine-learning algorithm called model-based recursive partitioning to model how growth in GDP is passed through to growth as observed in household surveys. When holding within-country inequality unchanged and letting GDP per capita grow according to World Bank forecasts and historically observed growth rates, our simulations suggest that the number of extreme poor (living on less than 1.90 dollars/day) will remain above 600 million in 2030, resulting in a global extreme poverty rate of 7.4 percent. If the Gini index in each country decreases by 1 percent per year, the global poverty rate could reduce to around 6.3 percent in 2030, equivalent to 89 million fewer people living in extreme poverty. Reducing each country’s Gini index by 1 percent per year has a larger impact on global poverty than increasing each country’s annual growth 1 percentage point above forecasts. We also study the impact of COVID-19 on poverty and find that the pandemic may have driven around 60 million people into extreme poverty in 2020. If the pandemic increased the Gini index by 2 percent in all countries, then more than 90 million may have been driven into extreme poverty in 2020.
Transnational Terrorist Recruitment: Evidence from Daesh Personnel Records

(MIT Press, 2022-01-25) Brockmeyer, Anne ; Do, Quy-Toan ; Joubert, Clement ; Bhatia, Kartika ; Abdel Jelil, Mohamed

Global terrorist organizations attract radicalized individuals across borders and constitute a threat for both sending and receiving countries. We use unique personnel records from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Daesh) to show that unemployment in sending countries is associated with the number of transnational terrorist recruits from these countries. The relationship is spatially heterogeneous, which is most plausibly attributable to travel costs. We argue that poor labor market opportunities generally push more individuals to join terrorist organizations, but at the same time limit their ability to do so when longer travel distances imply higher migration costs.
The Equity Effects of Cadasters in Colombia

(Taylor & Francis, 2021-08-01) Cuesta, Jose ; Pico, Julieth

Well-functioning cadasters help to secure property rights, make economies perform more efficiently and promote environmental conservation. However, their equity effects are less known. Our study addresses how and to what extent cadasters, and reforms to them, affect equity. The authors address this question through an ex-ante simulation methodology using static partial equilibrium fiscal incidence analysis. We apply it to a recent expansion of the cadaster in Colombia, designed as a deliberate equalization strategy in one of the world’s most unequal countries. This expansion will increase the collection of property taxes paid by previously informal households by about US 22.1 million dollars and their net worth by about US 4,993 million dollars (or about 3.2 and 4.9 percent of their baseline value). However, the expansion of the cadaster will also increase the incidence of poverty (by 0.25 percent points), the poverty gap (by 0.20 percent points) and inequality (by 0.12 percent points of the Gini index), unless generous compensatory interventions are applied. We conclude that equity effects of cadasters are complex and multiple. Policy-wide, compensatory measures are needed to alleviate the immediate impacts on poverty and inequality after the increase in taxes that vulnerable and poor households will likely face following a cadaster reform.
Mentoring Migrants for Labor Market Integration: Policy Insights from a Survey of Mentoring Theory and Practice

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-06-01) Bagnoli, Lisa ; Estache, Antonio

The vast majority of international migrants from developing countries are of working age. And yet, their integration in the formal local labor market of their host countries continues to be a challenge. This paper reviews the scope of mentoring programs as a more systematic policy instrument to facilitate the integration of migrants into the labor market. It synthesizes the multidisciplinary academic research on mentoring. The review highlights the diversity of outcomes indicators and the relevance of context in the choice of mentoring program design. Determinants of success include the personal characteristics of the mentee and of the mentor and the efforts to match them but also the efforts made to account for the human, institutional, financial, and political context in the overall design of programs. Despite the significant progress achieved in understanding the determinants of mentoring effectiveness, the survey shows that there are still many sources of uncertainty on the optimal design of mentoring programs. This justifies a research agenda in a field with growing and significant political and social prominence of direct relevance to both developed and developing countries.
Can Jobs Programs Build Peace?

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-09-30) Brück, Tilman ; Ferguson, Neil T. N. ; Izzi, Valeria ; Stojetz, Wolfgang

In the last decade, well over $10 billion has been spent on employment programs designed to contribute to peace and stability. Despite the outlay, whether these programs perform, and how they do so, remain open questions. This study conducts three reviews to derive the status quo of knowledge. First, it draws on academic literature on the microfoundations of instability to distill testable theories of how employment programs could affect stability at the micro level. Second, it analyses academic and grey literature that directly evaluates the impacts of employment programs on peace-related outcomes. Third, it conducts a systematic review of program-based learning from over 400 interventions. This study finds good theoretical reasons to believe that employment programs could contribute to peace. However, only very limited evidence exists on overall impacts on peace or on the pathways underlying the theories of change. At the program level, the review finds strong evidence that contributions to peace and stability are often simply assumed to have occurred. This provides a major challenge for the justification of continued spending on jobs for peace programs. Instead, systematic and rigorous learning on the impacts of jobs for peace programs needs to be scaled up urgently.
The Role of Historical Christian Missions in the Location of World Bank Aid in Africa

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02-05) Alpino, Matteo ; Hammersmark, Eivind Moe

This article documents a positive and sizable correlation between the location of historical Christian missions and the allocation of present-day World Bank aid at the grid-cell level in Africa. The correlation is robust to an extensive set of geographical and historical control variables that predict settlement of missions. The study finds no correlation with aid effectiveness, as measured by project ratings and survey-based development indicators. Mission areas display a different political aid cycle than other areas, whereby new projects are less likely to arrive in years with new presidents. Hence, political connections between mission areas and central governments could be one likely explanation for the correlation between missions and aid.
Twenty Years of Wage Inequality in Latin America

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-12-06) Messina, Julian ; Silva, Joana

This article documents an inverse U-shape in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since 1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995 and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, the 90/10 log hourly earnings ratio decreased by 26 percent. The decline since 2002 was characterized by rising wages across the board, but especially at the bottom of the wage distribution in each country. Triggered by a rapid expansion of educational attainment, the wages of college and high school graduates fell relative to the wages of workers with only primary education. The premium for labor market experience also fell significantly. However, the compression of wages was not entirely driven by changes in the wage structure across skill groups. Two-thirds of the decline in the variance of wages took place within skill groups. Changes in the sectoral, occupational, and formal/informal composition of jobs matter for the process of reduction in inequality, but they do not fully account for the fall in within-skill variance. Evidence based on longitudinal matched employer-employee administrative data suggests that an important driver was falling wage dispersion across firms.
Societal Poverty: A Relative and Relevant Measure

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-11-02) Jolliffe, Dean ; Prydz, Espen Beer

Poverty lines are typically higher in richer countries, and lower in poorer ones, reflecting the relative nature of national assessments of who is considered poor. In many high-income countries, poverty lines are explicitly relative, set as a share of mean or median income. Despite systematic variation in how countries define poverty, global poverty counts are based on fixed-value lines. To reflect national assessments of poverty in a global headcount of poverty, this paper proposes a societal poverty line. The proposed societal poverty line is derived from 699 harmonized national poverty lines, has an intercept of $1 per day and a relative gradient of 50 percent of median national income or consumption. The societal poverty line is more closely aligned with national definitions of poverty than other proposed relative lines. By this relative measure, societal poverty has fallen steadily since 1990, but at a much slower pace than absolute extreme poverty.