Person:
Essama-Nssah, Boniface
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty and growth,
Program evaluation,
Social impact of public policy
Degrees
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
B. Essama-Nssah worked for 17 years for the World Bank in Washington, DC, before he retired as a senior economist in 2011. During his tenure at the Bank, he performed economic analyses, prepared policy research and technical papers, and conducted an annual training course on impact evaluation methodologies for staff from the World Bank and client countries. Before joining the World Bank, Essama-Nssah worked for two years as a senior research associate on the Food and Nutrition Program at Cornell University, and for six years as head of the Economics Department and vice dean of the Faculty of Law and Economics of the University of Yaoundé, Cameroon. He currently works as a consultant focusing on poverty and growth incidence analysis, program evaluation, and analysis of the social impact of public policy. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Publication Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
Publication
A Unified Framework for Pro-Poor Growth Analysis
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-09)Starting with a general impact indicator as an evaluation criterion, The author offers an integrative framework for a unified discussion of various concepts and measures of pro-poor growth emerging from the current literature. He shows that whether economic growth is considered pro-poor depends fundamentally on the choice of evaluative weights. In addition, the author's framework leads to a new indicator of the rate of pro-poor growth that can be interpreted as the equally distributed equivalent growth rate. This is a distribution-adjusted rate of growth that depends on the chosen level of inequality aversion. Illustrations based on data for Indonesia in the 1990s show a strong link between growth and poverty reduction in that country. A decomposition of the observed poverty outcomes reveals the extent to which changes in inequality have blunted the poverty impacts of both growth and contraction. Finally, the results also demonstrate that absolute and relative indicators of pro-poor growth can lead to conflicting conclusions from the same set of facts. -
Publication
Too Little Too Late : Welfare Impacts of Rainfall Shocks in Rural Indonesia
( 2011-03-01)The authors use regression analysis to assess the potential welfare impact of rainfall shocks in rural Indonesia. In particular, they consider two shocks: (i) a delay in the onset of monsoon and (ii) a significant shortfall in the amount of rain in the 90 day post-onset period. Focusing on households with family farm businesses, the analysis finds that a delay in the monsoon onset does not have a significant impact on the welfare of rice farmers. However, rice farm households located in areas exposed to low rainfall following the monsoon are negatively affected. Rice farm households appear to be able to protect their food expenditure in the face of weather shocks at the expense of lower nonfood expenditures per capita. The authors use propensity score matching to identify community programs that might moderate the welfare impact of this type of shock. Access to credit and public works projects in communities were among the programs with the strongest moderating effects. This is an important consideration for the design and implementation of adaptation strategies.