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Zini, Michele Davide

Social Protection and Labor Global Practice of the World Bank
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Social protection, Social assistance, Cash transfers
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Social Protection and Labor Global Practice of the World Bank
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Michele Zini is an economist with the World Bank’s Social Protection and Labor Global Practice, working on European and Central Asian countries. Previously, he worked in the Social Protection and Labor Unit of the World Bank’s East Asia Region. He is a graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government with an MPA in International Development. He also holds an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and a Bachelors in Economics from University of Bologna. Between 2007 and 2009, he worked in South Africa at the World Bank's country office, focusing on public services delivery reforms, labor market issues, and macroeconomic analysis. Prior to that, he worked as an economic consultant for London Economics, an economic consultancy firm in London carrying out economic studies for the European Commission and the British Government.

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    Leveraging Behavioral Science to Increase the Impact of Economic Inclusion Programming
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-04-18) Datta, Saugato; Joshi, Mukta; MacLeod, Catherine; Zini, Michele Davide
    Behavioral science-the study of how humans make decisions and take actions—can provide insight into a host of issues that impact the effectiveness of programs that rely on people acting in certain ways. Behavioral science can be utilized to understand how living in poverty, with chronically scarce resources, affects people's decisions and actions. This can be particularly effective when combined with other program components in economic inclusion programs, which offer a bundle of coordinated, multidimensional interventions that support individuals, households, and communities in their efforts to increase their incomes and assets. By incorporating an understanding of behavioral science into economic inclusion programming, governments and nongovernment organizations seeking to bring millions out of poverty with limited resources can ensure that their programs are designed to account for human behavior.
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    Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015-06-30) Sundaram, Ramya; Hoerning, Ulrich; De Andrade Falcao, Natasha; Millan, Natalia; Tokman, Carla; Zini, Michele
    Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion presents “profiles” or “portraits” of individuals who have limited labor-market attachment. It is widely accepted that those with limited attachment to the labor market are a highly heterogeneous group (including, for instance, recent job losers, long-term unemployed, school leavers with no labor-market experience, those close to retirement age, or people with caring responsibilities), and that understanding their circumstances and potential barriers is an essential prerequisite for designing and implementing a tailored and effective mix of policy support and incentives. The report takes a comprehensive view, focusing on both the labor market attachment of a country’s out-of-work population and the social assistance package and poverty profile of the same segment of the population. In essence, the report looks at individuals through the lenses of both poverty/welfare status and labor market indicators, and, in doing so, the portraits helps move the dialogue from a purely labor market-centric view to a broader dialogue that includes social policy as a whole. This is an important shift; for instance, social protection programs, such as family benefits and maternity benefits, and broader social policy issues such as retirement ages, often have a great impact on who remains inactive. Specifically, the report presents portraits of the out-of-work population of six countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania and Romania) in terms of distance from the labor market, human capital, and labor supply conditions, as well as demographic conditions. The analysis relies on the European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) surveys for the years 2007 to 2011. Latent class analysis methodology allows multidimensional profiling of the out-of-work population, and identifies classes or groups of out-of-work individuals that are as homogeneous as possible within each class according to a set of observable characteristics, and as distant as possible between classes.
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    Publication
    Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-08) Sundaram, Ramya; Hoerning, Ulrich; De Andrade Falcao, Natasha; Millan, Natalia; Tokman, Carla; Zini, Michele
    The financial crisis that hit the global market in the middle of 2008 gave way to the sharpest contraction of the European economies since the Great Depression. In 2009 the economic output in the countries of the European Union shrank 4.5 percent, the largest reduction in GDP since its creation. Since then, the economies have slowly recovered, but unemployment has continued to rise, reaching 11 percent in 2013, up from 7.1 percent in 2008. The economy of the European Union shrank 4.5 percent, the largest reduction in its GDP since the Union s creation. Furthermore, for the European Union as a whole, long-term unemployment among 15- to 64-year-olds has increased from 37.2 percent in 2008 to 47.5 percent of total unemployment in 2013. In several countries more than half of those unemployed are long-term unemployed, that is, they have been looking for jobs for more than 12 months. In Greece and Bulgaria the share of long-term unemployed in 2013 was 67.5 percent and 57.3 percent, respectively. Youth unemployment, on the other hand, has increased almost 8 percent since 2008, reaching 23.3 percent in 2013 in the EU-28 countries. In Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, around a fourth of 15- to 24-year-olds are unemployed; in Greece close to 60 percent of youth were unemployed in 2013. Long spells of unemployment expose individuals to impoverishment. They can also lead to deterioration of skills and detachment from the labor market. Youth unemployment is particularly concerning as it risks damaging longer-term employment prospects for young people, leading them to face higher risks of exclusion and poverty. Youth unemployment also has growth implications as a generation of educated and productive people are not working at their potential. Finally, very high levels of youth unemployment for long periods of time can become a threat to social stability.