Person:
Zhang, Fan

Last updated:November 5, 2025

Biography

Fan Zhang is the Lead Economist and Global Lead for Water Economics at the World Bank. She previously worked in the Chief Economist’s Offices of Infrastructure, South Asia, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia Region, as well as in the Energy and Extractives Global Practice. She has led lending and advisory programs on energy, transportation, climate, green growth, and poverty. At the Water Global Unit, she leads a multi-year research program on water economics and directs the World Bank Global Water Monitoring Report series. She has authored several books, published widely in peer-reviewed journals, and her work has been featured in major outlets such as The Economist and Bloomberg. Before joining the Bank, she was an Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.

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Continental Drying: A Threat to Our Common Future
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-04) Zhang, Fan; Borja-Vega, Christian; Chandanpurkar, Hrishikesh Arvind; Famiglietti, James; Hogeboom, Rick; Namara, Regassa; Rasul, Zarif; Luengas-Sierra, Pavel; Rao, Deyu
Grounded in new evidence from satellite data, “Continental Drying: A Threat to Our Common Future” presents the first global assessment of freshwater reserves over the past two decades. The findings expose an alarming trend of “continental drying,” a persistent long-term decline in freshwater availability across vast landmasses. Not only are droughts and deluges becoming more unpredictable, but the total amount of freshwater available for use has also significantly declined. Continental drying, driven by global warming, worsening droughts, and unsustainable water and land use, is a silent but accelerating crisis—largely unknown to the public—that reshapes the global water narrative. Continental drying raises profound risks. This report reveals new empirical evidence showing how freshwater depletion leads to major job losses, reduced incomes, wildfires, and biodiversity threats. In the long term, the combined effects of drying and warming could push societies toward a tipping point where damage accelerates rapidly and adaptation becomes increasingly difficult. Against the backdrop of continental drying, global water consumption rose by 25 percent between 2000 and 2019, with about a third of this increase occurring in regions already experiencing drying. Compounding the pressure, a substantial share of water use in drying regions remains inefficient. Continental Drying identifies hot spots where rising demand and declining supply converge and explores where and how water savings can be realized. This report recommends a three-pronged approach to address the crisis: managing demand, augmenting water supply, and improving water allocation. Five cross-cutting levers—strengthening institutions, reforming water tariffs and repurposing subsidies, adopting water accounting, leveraging data and technological innovations, and valuing water in trade—are essential for effective implementation and to attract private investment to finance the approach. Beyond water, addressing trade barriers, investing in education and skills development, and improving access to markets and financial services are critical for strengthening job and livelihood resilience amid a continental drying crisis.
Water for Shared Prosperity
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-21) Zhang, Fan; Borja-Vega, Christian
In 1997, thousands of people gathered in Marrakesh, Morocco, for the first World Water Forum to address an urgent problem: the global water crisis. The meeting resulted in the Marrakech Declaration, a pledge that called on the World Water Council to develop a “World Water Vision” for the 21st century. In 2024, thousands are convening in Bali, Indonesia, for the 10th World Water Forum. Indonesia and Morocco are worlds apart in many ways. As the world’s largest archipelago, Indonesia is surrounded by water. On the other hand, Morocco is partly occupied by the Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert. However, one reality these (and many other) countries share is water stress. The 10th World Water Forum is an invitation to consider the collective water issues in countries as different as Indonesia and Morocco and to draw parallels among them. But it is also about finding solutions This report makes three major contributions. It (1) provides a conceptual framework to illustrate the relationship between water and shared prosperity; (2) presents new empirical evidence on the drivers, extent and costs of inequalities in water access, as well as disparities in the impacts of climate-related water shocks; and (3) identifies policy responses to improve water access, strengthen climate resilience, and promote shared prosperity on a livable planet.
Weather, Water, and Work: Climatic Water Variability and Labor Market Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-27) Khan, Amjad M.; Kuate, Landry; Pongou, Roland; Zhang, Fan
Vulnerability to climate change and water scarcity is increasing globally. How this affects individual employment outcomes is still not well understood. Using survey data collected from approximately half a million individuals across Sub-Saharan Africa over from 2005 to 2018, this paper examines the causal relationship between water availability and labor market outcomes. It combines georeferenced household survey data with a drought index that captures the exogenous effects of both rainfall and temperature on water availability. The findings suggest that extremely dry periods decrease employment by 2.5 percentage points on average, and wet periods with an abundance of soil moisture (not flooding) increase employment by 4 percentage points. The negative effects of dry shocks are larger in rural, poorer, and agriculture-dependent areas and for individuals who hold low-skilled jobs or work as farmers. Moreover, the paper finds that the burden of dry shocks disproportionately falls on women, while the benefits of wet shocks accrue more to men. The presence of irrigation infrastructure and the historical evolution of local livelihood strategies—historical mode of subsistence—partly mediate the impacts of water shocks.
Does Africa Need More Roads in the Digital Age?: Evidence of Complementarities in Infrastructure
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-22) Lebrand, Mathilde; Mongoue, Arcady; Pongou, Roland; Zhang, Fan
This paper investigates whether the expansion of fast internet networks complements or substitutes for the development of roads to improve market access and create more and higher-skilled jobs in Africa. The paper combines the geographic locations of households and firms with the locations of main roads and optical-fiber nodes in 25 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using the difference-in-differences and instrumental variables approaches and leveraging the history of post-independence road building and the timing of the arrival of submarine internet, the paper examines the impacts of access to these two types of infrastructure, both in isolation and in combination. The findings show that improving access to both has large and positive complementary effects. On average, the additional impacts on employment from combining access to both types of infrastructure are 22 percent larger than the sum of their isolated effects. The findings suggest that a big push for combined investments in fast internet and road access could enhance economic development in Africa overall. Firms and workers in urban locations, female workers, and workers with higher levels of education gain the most from the complementarities that emerge.
Combining Remote Sensing and Cell Phone Users’ Mobility Data to Monitor the Impact of Transportation on NO2 Concentrations in India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-12) Grainger, Corbett; Theising, Adam; Zhang, Fan
Estimating the extent to which transportation contributes to air pollution levels has been hampered by the difficulty in separating the relative degree of ambient nitrogen dioxide generated by transportation, power generation, and industrial activity—all of which play roles. This paper addresses this gap by isolating the impact of ground-level mobility on air pollution in India through a combination of remotely sensed tropospheric nitrogen dioxide measures and data from mobile phone users’ locations. The paper constructs vectors of ground-level movement of cell phones to estimate the impact of daily changes in mobility within a given district, controlling for both daily thermal electricity generation from upwind power plants and trends in ambient pollution concentrations over time and space. The findings show that tropospheric nitrogen dioxide concentrations are very responsive to changes in mobility, and that the effect varies with population density. The findings show that a 1 percent increase in mobility increases nitrogen dioxide concentrations by more than 2 percent, suggesting that traffic congestion plays a significant role in air pollution.
Roads, Electricity, and Jobs: Evidence of Infrastructure Complementarity in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-03) Abbasi, Mansoureh; Lebrand, Mathilde Sylvie Maria; Mongoue, Arcady Bluette; Pongou, Roland; Zhang, Fan
Evidence for road expansion and electrification as drivers of job creation is limited and mixed, with most studies having considered either one or the other, and only in isolation. This paper estimates the average and heterogeneous impacts of road and electricity investments and the interaction of the two on job creation over the past two decades in 27 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Exploiting the exogenous location of ancestral ethnic homelands, a new instrumental variable is created for road accessibility, inspired by post-independence leaders' agenda of building roads to extend authority over the entire expanse of their country, and to promote nation building. Topography and lightning strikes—a key source of damage to electric lines and disruption of service—are used to instrument electricity supply. The paper finds positive and significant effects on employment from enhancing proximity to roads and to electric grids. Moreover, the interaction of the two enhances the effects, making them complementary investments. The impacts of both individual and bundled investments are positive, but with differences between men and women, workers of various ages, and countries at different stages of development. In urban areas, better access to roads and electricity promotes all types of employment. In rural areas, greater access induces a transition from low- to high-skilled occupations. These differential effects suggest that the structural transformation brought about by road and electricity expansion is primarily a rural phenomenon.
Understanding Drivers of Decoupling of Global Transport CO2 Emissions from Economic Growth: Evidence from 145 Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10) Dim, Jennifer Uju; Foster, Vivien; Vollmer, Sebastian; Zhang, Fan
This paper examines the extent to which countries have succeeded in decoupling transport emissions from economic growth, and how changes in emissions intensity, economic growth, and population growth have contributed to changes in transportation-related emissions. The paper employs a modified version of the Tapio decoupling model, and demonstrates that over the 1990–2018 study period only 12 of 145 countries achieved “absolute decoupling,” defined as reducing emissions while growing gross domestic product. The majority of the top emitters remain in a “relative decoupling” state, with emissions growing more slowly than gross domestic product. Many of the middle- and low-income countries have not achieved decoupling; their emissions are growing as fast as or faster than gross domestic product. To understand the driving factors of transport-related carbon emissions, the paper conducts index-decomposition and an econometric analysis. The results reveal that while transportation emission intensity has declined in most countries, economic growth and population growth have offset these declines. If these patterns continue, achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement with improvements in efficiency alone seems unrealistic. The paper also shows evidence that higher energy prices are associated with strong emissions reduction.
The Global Diffusion of Electric Vehicles: Lessons from the First Decade
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12) Li, Shanjun; Wang, Binglin; Yang, Muxi; Zhang, Fan
Electrifying the transportation sector is key to reaching the goal of carbon neutrality. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the diffusion of passenger electric vehicles based on detailed data on model-level electrical vehicle sales across the world from 2013 to 2020. The analysis shows that the highly uneven electrical vehicle penetration across countries is partly driven by cross-country variation in incentives and especially in the availability of charging infrastructure. Investment in charging infrastructure would have been much more cost-effective than consumer purchase subsidies in promoting electrical vehicle adoption. This finding highlights the importance of expanding charging infrastructure in the next phase of deeper electrical vehicle diffusion.
The Role of Government in the Market for Electric Vehicles: Evidence from China
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08) Li, Shanjun; Zhu, Xianglei; Ma, Yiding; Zhang, Fan; Zhou, Hui
To promote the development and diffusion of electric vehicles, central and local governments in many countries have adopted various incentive programs. This study examines the policy and market drivers behind the rapid development of the electric vehicle market in China, by far the largest one in the world. The analysis is based on the most comprehensive data on electric vehicle sales, local and central government incentive programs, and charging stations in 150 cities from 2015 to 2018. The study addresses the potential endogeneity of key variables, such as local policies and charging infrastructure, using the border regression design and instrumental variable method. The analysis shows that central and local subsidies accounted for over half of the electric vehicles sold during the data period. Investment in charging infrastructure is much more cost-effective than consumer purchase subsidies. In addition, the policy that merely provided electric vehicles a distinctively license plate was strikingly effective. These findings demonstrate the varying efficacy across policy instruments and highlight the critical role of government in promoting fuel-saving technologies.
Transportation and the Environment: A Review of Empirical Literature
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10) Li, Shanjun; Xing, Jianwei; Yang, Lin; Zhang, Fan
In urban areas around the world, increasing motorization and growing travel demand make the urban transportation sector an ever-greater contributor to local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The situation is particularly acute in developing countries, where growing metropolitan regions suffer some of the world’s highest levels of air pollution. Policies that seek to develop and manage this transportation sector—to meet rising demand linked to economic growth and safeguard the environment and human health—have had strikingly different results, with some inadvertently exacerbating the traffic and pollution they seek to mitigate. This paper provides an overview of the findings of the recent literature on the impacts of a host of urban transportation policies used in developed and developing country settings. The paper identifies research challenges and future areas of study of transportation policies, which can have important, long-lasting impacts on urban life and global climate change.