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Seshan, Ganesh

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Seshan, Ganesh K.

Last updated:August 20, 2025

Biography

Ganesh Seshan is a Senior Economist in the Poverty Global Practice Group at the World Bank. Currently he leads the poverty program in Lebanon. His has previously worked on the distributional impact of trade liberalization in Vietnam and Sri Lanka, exchange rate devaluation in Djibouti, Maghreb economic integration, impacts of CDD programs in host communities in Kenya and Ethiopia and on international migration from Indonesia and India. The work on migration has focused on examining policies and social programs to enhance the developmental impact of migration and remittances. Seshan’s research has been published among others in the Journal of Development Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, World Bank Economic Review and Journal of Development Studies.  He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Virginia.

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https://hdl.handle.net/10986/43620

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Now showing1 - 9 of 9

June 2025 Update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP)
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-11) Alfani, Federica; Aaron, Danielle V.; Atamanov, Aziz; Aguilar, R.Andres Castaneda; Diaz-Bonilla, Carolina; Devpura, Nancy P.; Dewina, Reno; Finn, Arden; Fujs, Tony; Gonzalez, Maria Fernanda; Krishnan, Nandini; Kochhar, Nishtha; Kumar, Naresh; Lakner, Christoph; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lestani, Diego; Liniado, Julia; Lønborg, Jonas; Mahler, Daniel G.; Mejía-Mantilla, Carolina; Montalva, Veronica; Herrera, Laura L.; Nguyen, Minh C.; Rubiano, Eliana; Sajaia, Zurab; Castro, Diana M.; Seshan, Ganesh K.; Tetteh-Baah, Samuel K.; Mendoza, Martha C. Viveros; Wu, Haoyu; Yonzan, Nishant; Wambile, Ayago
The June 2025 update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) introduces several important changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. The most important change is the adoption of the 2021 Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs). In addition, new data for India has been incorporated and the existing series adjusted for comparability. This document details the changes to underlying data and the methodological reasons behind them. Depending on the availability of recent survey data, global and regional poverty estimates are reported up to 2023, together with nowcasts up to 2025. The PIP database now includes 74 new country-years, bringing the total number of surveys to over 2,400, for 172 economies.
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, Maheshwor
Migration 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.
Livelihood Impacts of Refugees on Host Communities: Evidence from Ethiopia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) Walelign, Solomon Zena; Wang Sonne, Soazic Elise; Seshan, Ganesh
Most refugee hosting communities are characterized by high levels of poverty with precarious livelihood conditions, low access to public services, and underdeveloped infrastructure. While the unexpected inflow of refugees might bring both constraints and opportunities for improving and maintaining local livelihoods in these communities, the understanding of these effects remains limited. Using a household level micro data set from a 2018 baseline survey of the Ethiopia Development Response to Displacement Impacts Project, this paper assesses the impact of refugee inflow on the livelihood strategies of host communities with respect to diversification and agricultural commercialization. The endogeneity of refugee inflow is addressed by exploiting differences in factors that influence refugee arrival in the host communities. Specifically, the analysis uses potential refugee inflow as an instrument, which is the product of population density and intensity of conflicts (number of fatalities per event) in the closest region of the origin country to the refugee camp weighted by the distance of the refugee camp to the closest region. The paper also constructs an aggregate index to proxy households’ livelihood diversification strategies. The findings show that refugee inflow brings substantial benefits to host communities by creating significant jobs, in which people engage as secondary occupations, and triggers an increasing demand for livestock products. Specifically, while no effect was found on diversification of activities such as a primary occupation and crop product sales, a 1 percent increase in refugee inflow leads to a 2.7 percent rise in diversification of livelihood activities as a secondary occupation and a 15.9 percent increase in the value of livestock product sales. These effects tend to be heterogeneous across refugee hosting regions and the gender of the household head: negative effects were mainly observed in Gambella region, which hosts the largest refugee population in the country, and male-headed households were more likely to benefit from the refugee presence for the whole sample. The paper identifies households' increased engagement in different livelihood activities and access to markets as a potential mechanism for the observed effects. The findings add to the growing literature on the socioeconomic impacts of refugee inflow on host communities by showing an overall positive effect on the livelihoods and welfare of receiving communities.
Migration and Asset Accumulation in South India: Comparing Gains to Internal and International Migration from Kerala
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05) Seshan, Ganesh
This study examines the asset gains to households in Kerala, India, from two types of labor migration: moving overseas versus moving within India for employment. It draws on panel data from waves of a representative household survey conducted in 1998 and 2003. Migrant households as a whole experienced higher asset gains than non-migrant families over this five-year period. Contrary to theoretical expectations, asset gains were similar for households with an overseas migrant and those with a domestic migrant. Although less educated individuals tend to venture overseas, a wage premium over non-migrants enables them to earn as much in low-skill jobs abroad as more educated workers relocating within India can.
Asymmetric Information about Migrant Earnings and Remittance Flows
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2017-02) Seshan, Ganesh; Zubrickas, Robertas
We examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of Indian households with husbands working overseas in Qatar. On average, wives underreport their husbands’ income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants. The discrepancy in earning reports is strongly correlated with variation in remittances: greater underreporting by wives is associated with lower remittances. We develop an exchange model of remittances with asymmetric information and costly state verification. The optimal remittance contract prescribes a threshold for remittances that invites verification only if unmet. The model's predictions closely match our empirical findings.
Asymmetric Information about Migrant Earnings and Remittance Flows
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-07) Seshan, Ganesh; Zubrickas, Robertas
This paper examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of Indian households with husbands working overseas in Qatar. On average, wives underreport their husbands’ income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants. The discrepancy in earning reports is strongly correlated with variation in remittances: greater underreporting by wives is associated with lower remittances. An exchange model of remittances is developed with asymmetric information and costly state verification. The optimal remittance contract prescribes a threshold for remittances that invites verification only if unmet. The model’s predictions closely match our empirical findings.
Fiscal and Social Impact of a Nominal Exchange Rate Devaluation in Djibouti
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-10) Anós Casero, Paloma; Seshan, Ganesh
Limited fiscal space limits Djibouti's ability to meet the Millennium Development Goals and improve the living conditions of its population. Djibouti's fiscal structure is unique in that almost 70 percent of government revenue is denominated in foreign currency (import taxes, foreign aid grants, and military revenue) while over 50 percent of government expenditure is denominated in local currency (wages, salaries, and social transfers). Djibouti's economic structure is also unusual in that merchandise exports of local origin are insignificant, and the country relies heavily on imported goods (food, medicines, consumer and capital goods). A currency devaluation, by reducing real wages, could potentially generate additional fiscal space that would help meet Djibouti's fundamental development goals. Using macroeconomic and household level data, the authors quantify the impact of a devaluation of the nominal exchange rate on fiscal savings, real public sector wages, real income, and poverty under various hypothetical scenarios of exchange-rate pass-through and magnitude of devaluation. They find that a currency devaluation could generate fiscal savings in the short-term, but it would have an adverse effect on poverty and income distribution. A 30 percent nominal exchange rate devaluation could generate fiscal savings amounting between 3 and 7 percent of GDP. At the same time, a 30 percent nominal devaluation could cause nearly a fifth of the poorest households to fall below the extreme poverty line and pull the same fraction of upper middle-income households below the national poverty line. The authors also find that currency devaluation could generate net fiscal savings even after accounting for the additional social transfers needed to compensate the poor for their real income loss. However, the absence of formal social safety nets limits the government's readiness to provide well-targeted and timely social transfers to the poor.
The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Household Welfare in Vietnam
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-03) Seshan, Ganesh
What is the effect of trade liberalization on households in developing countries? To what extent do the poor benefit when local markets are made more accommodative to international trade? The author empirically analyzes the distributional impact of trade policies on households in a low-income country with a large rural economy where labor markets are imperfect. The methodology in this paper, which can be applied to various types of labor market conditions, relates changes in prices attributed to trade reforms to changes in household welfare, income distribution, and poverty using theoretically consistent measures of producer and consumer welfare. The author investigates the effects on poverty and income distribution of national and international market integration in Vietnam's rice sector and fertilizer market between 1993 and 1998, a period of ongoing market reforms when the national poverty rate fell sharply from 59 percent to 37 percent. He finds that when the effects of opening the rice and fertilizer market are isolated, Vietnam's agricultural trade reforms did not contribute to a significant improvement in overall household welfare or decline in poverty over this period. Nonetheless, the liberalization exercise can explain about half of the reduction in poverty incidence among farm households. The results also show that liberalization did not exacerbate income inequality, but did generate gains for rural households across the distribution, particularly the poor, at the expense of urban households.
Public-Private Sector Wage Differentials and Returns to Education in Djibouti
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-05) Anós Casero, Paloma; Seshan, Ganesh
Do public sector workers earn a wage premium in Djibouti and are the returns to education different across the sectors? The authors estimate private and public sector wage earnings using 1996 household survey data, while controlling for selectivity using Heckman's two stage approach. They find that Djiboutian public sector employees earn a wage premium, independent of their personal attributes and human capital endowments, and are more likely to be males and have parents in the public sector. Workers in the public sector earn higher private rates of return to education than do private sector workers with post-secondary schooling. These results raise concerns about current government hiring and wage-setting practices that generate distortions in the labor market and are not efficiently allocating labor and public resources.