Person: Adhikari, Samik
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Last updated:August 20, 2025
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Samik Adhikari is a Senior Economist in the Social Protection and Jobs GP at the World Bank. During his time at the World Bank, he has worked on a range of analytical and operational engagements on topics related to social safety nets, labor markets, and labor migration in Africa and MENA regions. Samik graduated with a Master’s in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard University where he wrote his final policy analysis paper on reducing the cost of migration in Nepal. Before attending graduate school, he worked with Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) in India on studies assessing the impact of providing price information to farmers in rural Gujarat and on measuring the willingness of below poverty line households to contribute to social security bundle at subsidized prices, jointly with the Ministry of Finance.
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Publication Migration: Africa’s Untapped Potential(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-08-21) Abdel Jelil, Mohamed; Adhikari, Samik; Do, Quy-Toan; Kaila, Heidi; Marzo, Federica; Nsababera, Olive; Seshan, Ganesh; Shrestha, MaheshworMigration in Africa is primarily driven by the search for economic opportunity, safety, and security, including from environmental hardships. However, migration’s potential to uplift African livelihoods remains largely untapped. While nearly 15 percent of the world’s migrant population is from Sub-Saharan Africa, two-thirds of Sub-Saharan migrants stay within Africa, and the majority move within regional economic communities. Africa is also home to a quarter of the world’s refugees, primarily hosted in neighboring countries. Africa is now at a pivotal crossroads. With a rapidly growing young population facing economic stagnation, conflict, and climate change, the continent’s workforce is expected to increase by 600 million people by 2050, making up a third of the world’s youth. In contrast, labor forces in high-income and upper-middle-income countries are set to decline by 200 million. This demographic divergence opens a window of opportunity for Africa to enhance its migration management systems. Realizing the potential of migration requires deliberate policies to address challenges and maximize the benefits of migration for both origin and destination countries, as well as for the migrants. Investing in migration systems can better support migrants across the migration cycle, from developing skills in demand domestically, regionally, and globally to ensuring dignity and safety in transit or at their destination. Increasing the number of legal migration pathways is crucial to disincentivize irregular movements and foster safe, orderly migration. Effective migration management also includes promoting integration in host societies and facilitating voluntary returns. This can be achieved through instruments such as bilateral labor migration agreements with destination countries. Entering these agreements as a unified bloc would strengthen individual countries’ bargaining power, improve conditions for migrants, and maximize the economic benefits of migration. Additionally, the empowerment and self-reliance of refugees and internally displaced persons call for increased collaboration among African nations.Publication Do Bilateral Labor Agreements Increase Migration? Global Evidence from 1960 to 2020(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-17) Adhikari, Samik; Cha'ngom, Narcisse; Kaila, Heidi; Shrestha, MaheshworThis paper estimates the impact of bilateral labor arrangements on migration between two countries. It uses comprehensive data on bilateral migration and bilateral labor agreements across all country pairs for each decade from 1960 to 2020, and employs an empirical specification with a rich set of fixed effects. In the preferred and most stringent specification, the findings show that signing a bilateral labor agreement increases migration from an origin country to a destination country by 76 percent (0.57 log points) in the decade of signing. The effect persists for up to three decades. The impacts are higher for corridors without a pre-existing regular flow and for destinations in the Gulf Cooperation Council. In contrast, the effect is virtually absent for origin countries in Africa, driven by countries with weak government effectiveness. The estimates imply that bilateral labor agreements can lead to substantial welfare gains: low- and lower-middle-income countries can earn an additional US$120 million annually from a bilateral labor agreement. If countries in Sub-Saharan Africa were to experience similar impacts, the welfare gain from a single BLA could be as high as US$51 million per year for these origin countries.Publication Of Roads Less Traveled: Assessing the Potential of Economic Migration to Provide Overseas Jobs for Nigeria’s Youth(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-12) Adhikari, Samik; Chaudhary, Sarang; Ekeator, Nkechi LindaNigerians are not only creating a vibrant and dynamic society within Nigeria but are also leaving their footprint across the globe in diverse fields ranging from medicine to movies, and from literature to diplomacy. The main purpose of this report is to aid discussion on creating new labor migration pathways for overseas employment of Nigerians. It aims to support the Government of Nigeria in filling critical information gaps to comprehensively shed light on the issue of international migration. Using available data from secondary sources, it places international migration within the broader labor market context in Nigeria, carefully stressing the push and pull factors that lead to both regular and irregular migration and makes the case for why more structured regular migration will be one of the crucial ways in which Nigeria can support education to work transition for young and aspiring Nigerian jobseekers. The report synthesizes the available evidence to understand the stock and flows of international migrants from Nigeria, major countries of destination, and key areas of vulnerabilities while identifying gaps in evidence to inform decision-making. The final contribution of this report is that it comprehensively assesses the institutional framework governing labor migration at the Federal level in Nigeria, underscoring the various stakeholders involved in the process, and underlining key gaps that are hampering Nigeria’s ability to enhance the benefits and reduce the costs from international migration. This report is structured in three parts. The first part looks at the broader labor market setting in Nigeria, along with the economic and demographic context, to highlight specific drivers of increased migratory pressure in recent years before postulating that the recent surge in irregular migration is a direct consequence of worsening joblessness combined with lack of regular channels for youth to find employment in other countries. The second part presents an analysis of the trends and patterns of international migration from Nigeria to provide insights on the characteristics of international migrants and their contribution to Nigeria’s economy. The third and final part highlights how international migration is increasingly being used as an employment strategy by developing countries and how despite the significant increase in remittance inflows, there is lack of an organized structure that promotes better migration management and facilitates safe and remunerative migration from Nigeria.Publication Expanding Legal Migration Pathways from Nigeria to Europe: From Brain Drain to Brain Gain(World Bank and Center for Global Development, Washington, DC, 2021-07-12) Adhikari, Samik; Clemens, Michael; Dempster, Helen; Ekeator, Nkechi LindaThe world is currently at a crossroads. Low- and middle-income countries such as Nigeria are seeing rapid growth in their working-age populations. Yet often, these increasingly educated and skilled young people cannot find meaningful work within their countries of origin, either because their skills are not well aligned to the needs of employers or because there is an absolute lack of roles available. This is creating emigration pressure, with many seeking opportunities elsewhere, leading to fears of brain drain within countries of origin. At the same time, high-income countries such as those in Europe are seeing rapid decreases in their working-age populations. Employers within these countries are facing significant skill shortages, which is reducing productivity and investment. Based on interviews with more than 100 stakeholders, this report applies the center for global development’s (CGD) global skill partnership model to the sectors of health care, construction, and information and communications technology (ICT), designing partnerships between Nigeria and select countries of destination in Europe. It outlines how countries of destination looking to fill labor shortages can provide high-quality and industry-relevant training to potential migrants and nonimmigrants within Nigeria, increasing the global stock of workers and contributing to brain gain.Publication Candle in the Wind?: Insights from COVID-19 Emergency Cash Transfers to Informal Sector Workers in Sierra Leone(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-04-10) Adhikari, Samik; Seetahul, SunehaThis paper takes stock of the insights and learnings from a COVID-19 emergency cash transfer program that was administered to vulnerable informal sector workers in Sierra Leone. It starts by reviewing relevant examples of cash transfer programs that were instituted in response to the COVID-19 crisis. It then describes the context, intervention, and data of the emergency cash transfer program, before presenting a quasi-experimental analysis of the emergency cash transfer’s potential impacts on various measures of economic security and subjective well-being of households with urban informal sector workers. The analysis is conducted by matching administrative data to survey data and using program eligibility criteria and inverse probability weights to identify the short- and medium-term relationship between a one-off US$135 cash transfer and various labor market, food security, human capital, and subjective well-being outcomes for recipient and nonrecipient households of the emergency cash transfer. The analysis finds a positive potential impact of the transfer and the number of hours worked as well as employment in the medium term. It also finds that program beneficiaries report higher chances of their main income increasing or staying the same compared to nonbeneficiaries. The positive correlation between the transfer and income disappears over the medium term, perhaps suggesting that one-off transfers work best to cushion vulnerable self-employed households and informal wage workers in the short term but do not impact medium-term employment or income.Publication Should I Stay or Should I Go: Do Cash Transfers Affect Migration?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-07) Adhikari, Samik; Gentilini, UgoThe paper reviews the evidence on a "hot" and yet underexplored question -- that is, whether and how social assistance programs (especially cash transfers) affect domestic and international migration. Out an initial sample of 269 papers, 10 relevant empirical studies examine the question. The programs are classified into three clusters: (i) social assistance that implicitly deters migration centering on place-based programs, (ii) social assistance that implicitly facilitates migration by relaxing liquidity constraints and reducing transaction costs, and (iii) social assistance that is explicitly conditioned on spatial mobility. The paper finds that impacts on migration generally align with the implicit or explicit goals of interventions. Under cluster (i), the likelihood of moving declined between 0.22 and 11 percentage points; among schemes in clusters (ii) and (iii), the probability to move soared between 0.32-25 and 20-55 percentage points, respectively. The analysis also finds spillover effects within households and communities. While social assistance seems not to determine migration decisions per se, it nonetheless enters the broader calculous of mobility decision making. As such, social protection can be an important part of public policy packages to manage mobility. More research is needed to improve understanding of the role of social protection in structural transformation -- a process underpinned by domestic mobility and the performance of which may ultimately affect international migration.Publication The Influence of Non-Cognitive Skills on Wages within and between Firms: Evidence from Bangladesh's Formal Sector(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05) Adhikari, Samik; Nomura, ShinsakuMany employers and employees believe that non-cognitive skills are an important contributor to labor market success. This study has assessed the empirical evidence for such a claim in the case of Bangladesh by evaluating unique employer-employee matched labor market data. The analysis is based on data collected from 6,981 workers in 500 formal sector firms in Bangladesh's five largest formal economic sectors. Using ordinary least squares and firm fixed-effect models, the study assesses correlations between wages and the so-called "big five" personality traits, and augments the analysis with the latent personality scores captured by the Rasch model. Comparing the ordinary least squares and fixed-effect models reveals statistically significant correlations between personality traits and wages, within and across firms. The results appear to indicate that non-cognitive skills are correlated with a worker's likelihood of achieving success in the labor market. Although many of the findings are consistent with the literature, the analysis reveals specific patterns that appear to be unique to Bangladesh, including a positive correlation between “emotional stability” and wages and a negative correlation between "grit" and wages, especially among manufacturing workers. Differences across firms could indicate that firms that offer higher wages may tend to attract workers with distinct types of non-cognitive skills, whereas differences within firms may indicate that variations in non-cognitive skills are associated with disparities in firm-level wage structures. Correlations between wages and personality traits are more prominent among large firms than among small or medium-sized firms.