Person:
Russ, Jason

Office of the Chief Economist of the Sustainable Development Practice, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Economics of Development, Environment, Water economics

ORCID

0000-0003-4967-1983

External Links

World Bank Blogs
Google Scholar

Last updated: May 3, 2023

Biography

Jason Russ is a Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist of the Sustainable Development Practice at the World Bank. His professional interests center on using econometrics and data analytics to diagnose development challenges, and quantify the economic and social impacts of environmental externalities. His tenure at the World Bank includes five years in the Water Global Practice where he helped to develop and coordinate the analytical work program of the Economics Global Solutions Group, including authoring many of its global flagship reports. He has authored numerous publications in academic journals largely related to environmental and development economics. Prior to joining the World Bank he was an analyst at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from George Washington University.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 13

Uncharted Waters: The New Economics of Water Scarcity and Variability
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-10-24) Damania, Richard; Desbureaux, Sébastien; Hyland, Marie; Islam, Asif; Rodella, Aude-Sophie; Russ, Jason; Zaveri, Esha
The 21st century will witness the collision of two powerful forces – burgeoning population growth, together with a changing climate. With population growth, water scarcity will proliferate to new areas across the globe. And with climate change, rainfall will become more fickle, with longer and deeper periods of droughts and deluges. This report presents new evidence to advance understanding on how rainfall shocks coupled with water scarcity, impacts farms, firms, and families. On farms, the largest consumers of water in the world, impacts are channeled from declining yields to changing landscapes. In cities, water extremes especially when combined with unreliable infrastructure can stall firm production, sales, and revenue. At the center of this are families, who feel the impacts of this uncertainty on their incomes, jobs, and long-term health and welfare. Although a rainfall shock may be fleeting, its consequences can become permanent and shape the destiny of those who experience it. Pursuing business as usual will lead many countries down a “parched path” where droughts shape destinies. Avoiding this misery in slow motion will call for fundamental changes to water policy around the globe. Building resilience to rainfall variability will require using different policy instruments to address the multifaceted nature of water. A key message of this report is that water has multiple economic attributes, each of which entail distinct policy responses. If water is not managed more prudently—from source, to tap, and back to source—the crises observed today will become the catastrophes of tomorrow.
Evaluating Transport Infrastructure Projects in Low Data Environments: An Application to Nigeria
(Taylor and Francis, 2018) Russ, Jason; Damania, Richard; Barra, A. Federico; Nash, John
Transport infrastructure consumes a large fraction of the development assistance envelope. Yet procedures for evaluating transport infrastructure projects are typically ad hoc. This paper proposes an approach to assess the differential impacts of alternative investment proposals in data constrained environments where conducting reliable impact analyses is difficult. We first demonstrate a technique for estimating the cost of transporting products to markets. We then estimate the impact of improving the road network on economic activity. Finally, we perform simulations to demonstrate a methodology for prioritizing alternative investments. The analysis demonstrates a pragmatic, though rigorous, approach for assessing transport infrastructure benefits.
Quality Unknown: The Invisible Water Crisis
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-08-20) Damania, Richard; Desbureaux, Sébastien; Rodella, Aude-Sophie; Russ, Jason; Zaveri, Esha
Water quantity—too much in the case of floods, or too little in the case of droughts—grabs public attention and the media spotlight. Water quality—being predominantly invisible and hard to detect—goes largely unnoticed. Quality Unknown: The Invisible Water Crisis presents new evidence and new data that call urgent attention to the hidden dangers lying beneath water’s surface. It shows how poor water quality stalls economic progress, stymies human potential, and reduces food production. Quality Unknown examines the effects of water quality on economic growth and finds upstream pollution lowers growth in downstream regions. It reveals that some of the most ubiquitous contaminants in water, such as nitrates and salt, have impacts that are larger, deeper, and wider than has been acknowledged. And it traces the damage to crop yields and the stark implications for food security in affected regions. An important step toward tackling the world’s water quality challenge is recognizing its scale. The world needs reliable, accurate, and comprehensive information so that policy makers can have new insights, decision making can be evidence based, and citizens can call for action. The report calls for a paradigm shift that emphasizes safer, and often more cost-effective remedies that prevent pollution by combining smarter policies with newer technologies. A key message of Quality Unknown is that such solutions exist and change is possible.
Transport, Economic Growth, and Deforestation in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A Spatial Analysis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01-13) Damania, Richard; Barra, Alvaro Federico; Burnouf, Mathilde; Russ, Jason Daniel
The purpose of this study is to demonstrate several techniques which can be used to evaluate pathways to sustainable growth in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) via infrastructure improvement. Decades of conflict and neglect have left the DRC’s transport infrastructure amongst the sparsest and most dilapidated in the world.
Infrastructure in Conflict-Prone and Fragile Environments: Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05) Ali, Rubaba; Barra, A. Federico; Berg, Claudia N.; Damania, Richard; Nash, John D.; Russ, Jason; Russ, Jason
In conflict-prone situations, access to markets is necessary to restore economic growth and generate the preconditions for peace and reconstruction. Hence, the rehabilitation of damaged transport infrastructure has emerged as an overarching investment priority among donors and governments. This paper brings together two distinct strands of literature on the effects of conflict on welfare and on the economic impact of transport infrastructure. The theoretical model explores how transport infrastructure affects conflict incidence and welfare when selection into rebel groups is endogenous. The implications of the model are tested with data from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The analysis addresses the problems of the endogeneity of transport costs and conflict using a novel set of instrumental variables. For transport costs, a new instrument is developed, the natural-historical path, which measures the most efficient travel route to a market, taking into account topography, land cover, and historical caravan routes. Recognizing the imprecision in measuring the geographic impacts of conflict, the analysis develops a spatial kernel density function to proxy for the incidence of conflict. To account for its endogeneity, it is instrumented with ethnic fractionalization and distance to the eastern border. A variety of indicators of well-being are used: a wealth index, a poverty index, and local gross domestic product. The results suggest that, in most situations, reducing transport costs has the expected beneficial impacts on all the measures of welfare. However, when there is intense conflict, improvements in infrastructure may not have the anticipated benefits. The results suggest the need for more nuanced strategies that take into account varying circumstances and consider actions that jointly target governance with construction activities.
Transport Infrastructure and Welfare: An Application to Nigeria
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05) Ali, Rubaba; Barra, Alvaro Federico; Berg, Claudia N.; Damania, Richard; Nash, John; Russ, Jason
Transport infrastructure is deemed to be central to development and consumes a large fraction of the development assistance envelope. Yet there is debate about the economic impact of road projects. This paper proposes an approach to assess the differential development impacts of alternative road construction and prioritize various proposals, using Nigeria as a case study. Recognizing that there is no perfect measure of economic well-being, a variety of outcome metrics are used, including crop revenue, livestock revenue, non-agricultural income, the probability of being multi-dimensionally poor, and local gross domestic product for Nigeria. Although the measure of transport is the most accurate possible, it is still endogenous because of the nonrandom placement of road infrastructure. This endogeneity is addressed using a seemingly novel instrumental variable termed the natural path: the time it would take to walk along the most logical route connecting two points without taking into account other, bias-causing economic benefits. Further, the analysis considers the potential endogeneity from nonrandom placement of households and markets through carefully chosen control variables. It finds that reducing transportation costs in Nigeria will increase crop revenue, non-agricultural income, the wealth index, and local gross domestic product. Livestock sales increase as well, although this finding is less robust. The probability of being multi-dimensionally poor will decrease. The results also cast light on income diversification and structural changes that may arise. These findings are robust to relaxing the exclusion restriction. The paper also demonstrates how to prioritize alternative road programs by comparing the expected development impacts of alternative New Partnership for Africas Development projects.
Agricultural Technology Choice and Transport
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05) Ali, Rubaba; Barra, A. Federico; Berg, Claudia N.; Damania, Richard; Nash, John D.; Russ, Jason
This paper addresses an old and recurring theme in development economics: the slow adoption of new technologies by farmers in many developing countries. The paper explores a somewhat novel link to explain this puzzle -- the link between market access and the incentives to adopt a new technology when there are non-convexities. The paper develops a theoretical model to guide the empirical analysis, which uses spatially disaggregated agricultural production data from Spatial Production Allocation Model and Living Standards Measurement Study survey data for Nigeria. The model is used to estimate the impact of transport costs on crop production, the adoption of modern technologies, and the differential impact on returns of modern versus traditional farmers. To overcome the limitation of data availability on travel costs for much of Africa, road survey data are combined with geographic information road network data to generate the most thorough and accurate road network available. With these data and the Highway Development Management Model, minimum travel costs from each location to the market are computed. Consistent with the theory, analysis finds that transportation costs are critical in determining technology choices, with a greater responsiveness among farmers who adopt modern technologies, and at times a perverse (negative) response to lower transport costs among those who employ more traditional techniques. In sum, the paper presents compelling evidence that the constraints to the adoption of modern technologies and access to markets are interconnected, and so should be targeted jointly.
Framework for Conducting Benefit-Cost Analyses of Investments in Hydro-Meteorological Systems
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06) Malik, Arun S.; Amacher, Gregory S.; Russ, Jason; Esikuri, Enos E.; Ashida Tao, Keiko
The whitepaper is organized as follows: section two provides an overview of the types of benefits associated with hydromet investments, the process by which the benefits are generated, and their expected development impacts; section three explains the rationale for public sector investment in hydromet systems and involvement by the World Bank; section four discusses the wide range of factors that influence the magnitude of benefits generated by hydromet systems, in particular the value of weather and climate forecasts. The discussion is supplemented by a stylized example presented in annex one; section five provides an overview of approaches that have been used to estimate the value of improved forecasts of routine climate to specific user groups or sectors of an economy; section six then turns to an overview of approaches that have been used to estimate the net benefits of hydromet investments at the country level. The primary benefits estimated by these approaches are those associated with improved forecasts of extreme meteorological events; section seven contains a discussion of the costs of hydromet investments, with particular attention given to the challenges faced in estimating these costs in developing countries; section eight lays out a framework for estimating the expected net benefits of hydromet investments at a country level. The framework builds on existing approaches and is designed to be used with data available from secondary sources. This section will be of central interest to those tasked with conducting economic evaluations of hydromet investments; section nine describes data that can be collected to conduct interim and ex-post evaluations of hydromet investments that supplement and refine ex-ante evaluations of these investments; and section ten offers conclusions and recommendations.
The Impact of Water Quality on GDP Growth: Evidence from Around the World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12-10) Desbureaux, Sebastien; Damania, Richard; Rodella, Aude-Sophie; Russ, Jason; Zaveri, Esha
Declining water quality can impact the economy in various ways. Impacts can be found in the health sector, where labor productivity can be affected, in agriculture, where the quality and quantity of food produced can be reduced, and in tourism, real estate, aquaculture/fisheries and other sectors which rely on environmental quality and ecosystem services. Despite these well-known impacts, finding economy-wide affects of water quality on economic activity can be elusive. In this paper we attempt to fill this gap by using a conventional empirical approach in contemporary environmental economics and new data on economic activity and water quality for nineteen countries from 1990-2014. The authors find that when rivers become very heavily polluted, regions downstream see reductions in economic growth, losing between 0.8 and 2.0 percent of economic growth. These losses imply that in many places, the costs of environmental degradation are severely under-estimated and well above efficient levels.
Salt of the Earth: Quantifying the Impact of Water Salinity on Global Agricultural Productivity
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12-10) Desbureaux, Sebastien; Russ, Jason; Escurra, Jorge; Damania, Richard; Rodella, Aude-Sophie; Zaveri, Esha
Salinity in surface waters is on the rise throughout much of the world. Many factors contribute to this change including increased water extraction, poor irrigation management, and sea-level rise. To date no study has attempted to quantify impacts on global food production. In this paper we develop a plausibly causal model to test the sensitivity of global and regional agricultural productivity to changes in water salinity. To do so, we utilize several local and global datasets on water quality and agricultural productivity and a model which isolates the impact of exogenous changes in water salinity on yields. We then train a machine learning model to predict salinity globally in order to simulate average global food losses from 2000-2013. These losses are found to be high, in the range of the equivalent of 124 trillion kilocalories, or enough to feed over 170 million people every day, each year. Global maps building on these results show that pockets of high losses occur on all continents but can be expected to be particularly problematic in regions already experiencing malnutrition challenges.