Ghani, Ejaz

Person:
Ghani, Ejaz

Econ. Policy & Debt Dept., World Bank

Departments

Econ. Policy & Debt Dept., World Bank

Last updated: December 5, 2023

Biography

Ejaz Ghani, an Indian national, is currently at The World Bank. He has worked on Africa, East Asia, and India/South Asia. He has written on poverty, growth, trade, fiscal policy, debt management, conflict, decentralization, entrepreneurship, employment, and agriculture. He has been a consultant at ILO, UNCTAD, and UNICEF. He has edited several books including Reshaping Tomorrow --Is South Asia Ready for the Big Leap? Oxford University Press 2011; The Poor Half Billion in South Asia, Oxford University Press 2010; The Service Revolution in South Asia, Oxford University Press 2010; Accelerating Growth and Job Creation in South Asia (with S. Ahmed) 2009, Promoting Economic Cooperation in South Asia (with S. Ahmed and S. Kelegama), 2009; and Growth and Regional Integration (with S. Ahmed) Macmillan 2007. He has taught economics at Delhi University (India) and Oxford University (U.K.). He is an Inlaks Scholar, and obtained an M. Phil. & D. Phil in Economics from Oxford University. He did his schooling in Bihar at St. Michael's High school Patna; undergraduate degree at St. Stephens College; and Masters degree at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 44

Mobility and Congestion in Urban India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08) Akbar, Prottoy A.; Couture, Victor; Duranton, Gilles; Ghani, Ejaz
This paper uses a popular web mapping and transportation service to generate information for more than 22 million counterfactual trip instances in 154 large Indian cities. It then develops a methodology to estimate robust indices of mobility for these cities. The estimation allows for an exact decomposition of overall mobility into uncongested mobility and the congestion delays caused by traffic. The paper first documents wide variation in mobility across Indian cities. It then shows that this variation is driven primarily by uncongested mobility. Finally, the paper investigates correlates of mobility and congestion. Denser and more populated cities are slower, in part because of congestion, especially close to their centers. Urban economic development is generally correlated with better uncongested mobility, worse congestion, and overall with better mobility.
Infrastructure and Finance: Evidence from India's GQ Highway Network
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Das, Abhiman; Ghani, Ejaz; Grover, Arti; Kerr, William; Nanda, Ramana
This paper uses the construction of India's Golden Quadrangle central highway network, together with comprehensive loan data from the Reserve Bank of India, to investigate the interaction between infrastructure development and financial sector depth. The paper identifies a disproportionate increase in loan count and average loan size in districts along the Golden Quadrangle highway network, using stringent specifications with industry and district fixed effects. The results hold in straight-line instrumental variable frameworks and are not present in placebo tests with another highway that was planned to be upgraded at the same time as Golden Quadrangle but subsequently delayed. Importantly, however, the results are concentrated in districts with stronger initial financial development, suggesting that although financing responds to large infrastructure investments and helps spur real economic outcomes, initial financial sector development might play an important role in determining where real activity will grow.
What Does MFN Trade Mean for India and Pakistan? Can MFN be a Panacea?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-06) De, Prabir; Raihan, Selim; Ghani, Ejaz
India and Pakistan, the two largest economies in South Asia, share a common border, culture and history. Despite the benefits of proximity, the two neighbors have barely traded with each other. In 2011, trade with Pakistan accounted for less than half a percent of India's total trade, whereas Pakistan's trade with India was 5.4 percent of its total trade. However, the recent thaw in India-Pakistan trade relations could signal a change. Pakistan has agreed to grant most favored nation status to India. India has already granted most favored nation status to Pakistan. What will be the gains from trade for the two countries? Will they be inclusive? Is most favored nation status a panacea? Should the granting of most favored nation status be accompanied by improvements in trade facilitation, infrastructure, connectivity, and logistics to reap the true benefits of trade and to promote shared prosperity? This paper attempts to answer these questions. It examines alternative scenarios on the gains from trade and it finds that what makes most favored nation status work is the trade facilitation that surrounds it. The results of the general equilibrium simulation indicate Pakistan's most favored nation status to India would generate larger benefits if it were supported by improved connectivity and trade facilitation measures. In other words, gains from trade would be small in the absence of improved connectivity and trade facilitation. The idea of trade facilitation is simple: implement measures to reduce the cost of trading across borders by improving infrastructure, institutions, services, policies, procedures, and market-oriented regulatory systems. The returns can be huge, even with modest resources and limited capacity. The dividends of trade facilitation can be shared by all.
Structural Transformation in Africa: A Historical View
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-07) Enache, Maria; Ghani, Ejaz; O'Connell, Stephen
This paper presents evidence suggesting that the relationship between income and economic structure is shifting over time, with countries across the income distribution uniformly increasing the share of labor in service sectors and an increasingly less stark relationship between manufacturing intensity and gross value added per capita. The paper then assesses historical patterns of productivity convergence at a more detailed sector disaggregation than has been previously available. The analysis finds suggestive evidence that, at least in recent decades, convergent pressures in services industries are stronger than in manufacturing. Focusing on African economies, the paper presents a country-by-country historical analysis of structural change over the past four decades. Given the varied patterns and trends in structural change across African countries, it is difficult to characterize structural change from a single, continent-wide perspective. Some countries saw an early transition of labor out of agriculture, with manufacturing absorbing this labor in the decades prior to the 1990s, while another group of countries saw a later transition out of agriculture, where the services sector played a large role in labor reallocations in the 1990s and 2000s. Finally, the paper provides a country-by-country structural transformation scorecard to assess patterns of structural change in jobs and growth.
Will Market Competition Trump Gender Discrimination in India?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-09) Kerr, Sari; Ghani, Ejaz; Kerr, William; Goswami, Arti Grover
Empowering women to engage in productive employment is not only critical to achieving gender equality but also critical for economic growth and poverty reduction. This paper studies the pattern of female activity and gender segmentation in the Indian manufacturing and services sectors. Although the share of women entrepreneurs and employees is larger in manufacturing than in services, segmentation based on gender is pervasive in both sectors. Theory, dating back to Gary Becker, suggests that competitive reforms should reduce the extent of this segregation. In spite of competition-inducing reforms such as investment in Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highways, trade liberalization and domestic reforms that India undertook since the turn of the century, this pattern of gender based segmentation has not subsided over the years. Specifically, investments in GQ upgrades are found to have 0 effects on female activity and gender segmentation. Although there is some evidence of a negative correlation between segmentation among male employees and industry level trade liberalization reforms, overall it had a very limited impact on female participation in labor force and in reducing segmentation among female employees. Finally, domestic reforms that dismantled product reservations for small-scale industries induced greater participation among women in economic activity and are correlated with a modest decline in segmentation among male employees. Segregation among female employees is positively associated with these reforms.
Spatial Development and Agglomeration Economies in Services--Lessons from India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06) Kerr, William R.; Ghani, Ejaz; Goswami, Arti Grover
Although many studies consider the spatial pattern of manufacturing plants in developing countries, the role of services as a driver of urbanization and structural transformation is still not well understood. Using establishment level data from India, this paper helps narrow this gap by comparing and contrasting the spatial development of services with that in manufacturing. The study during the 2001-2010 period suggests that (i) services are more urbanized than manufacturing and are moving toward the urban and, by contrast, the organized manufacturing sector is moving away from urban cores to the rural periphery; (ii) manufacturing and services activities are highly correlated in spatial terms and exhibit a high degree of concentration in just a few states and industries; (iii) manufacturing in urban districts has a stronger tendency to locate closer to larger cities relative to services activity; (iv) infrastructure has a significant effect on manufacturing output, while human capital matters more for services activity; and lastly, (v) technology penetration, measured by the penetration of the Internet, is more strongly associated with services than manufacturing. Similar results hold when growth in activity is measured over the study period rather than levels. Manufacturing and services do not appear to crowd each other out of local areas.
A Detailed Anatomy of Factor Misallocation in India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01) Duranton, Gilles; Ghani, Ejaz; Goswami, Arti Grover; Kerr, William
This paper complements the results of earlier work on factor misallocation. The paper first expands the methodology and provides two important decompositions for the main indices. The main result is that factor and output misallocation across districts is at least as important as misallocation within districts. Second, the paper provides an exploration of the service sector that complements earlier work on manufacturing. The analysis shows that labor plays a fundamental role for misallocation in services, whereas land is the determining factor in manufacturing. Third, the paper expands our earlier work on the effects of policies on misallocation by looking at a much broader range of policies, and find strong evidence of their effects on misallocation. Finally, the paper take steps towards the identification of the causal effect of misallocation on output per worker by developing a novel instrumental variable approach and a simulation approach that allows for checking the consistency of the empirical results.
The Golden Quadrilateral Highway Project and Urban/Rural Manufacturing in India
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2013-09) Kerr, William R.; Ghani, Ejaz; Goswami, Arti Grover
This study investigates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral highway project on the urban and rural growth of Indian manufacturing. The Golden Quadrilateral project upgraded the quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. The study uses a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to compare non-nodal districts based on their distance from the highway system. For the organized portion of the manufacturing sector, the Golden Quadrilateral project led to improvements in both urban and rural areas of non-nodal districts located 0-10 km from the Golden Quadrilateral. These higher entry rates and increases in plant productivity are not present in districts 10-50 km away. The entry effects are stronger in rural areas of districts, but the differences between urban and rural areas are modest relative to the overall effect. The productivity consequences are similar in both locations. The most important difference appears to be the greater activation of urban areas near the nodal cities and rural areas in remote locations along the Golden Quadrilateral network. For the unorganized sector, no material effects are found from the Golden Quadrilateral upgrades in either setting. These findings suggest that in the time frames that we can consider -- the first five to seven years during and after upgrades -- the economic effects of major highway projects contribute modestly to the migration of the organized sector out of Indian cities, but are unrelated to the increased urbanization of the unorganized sector.
Informal Tradables and the Employment Growth of Indian Manufacturing
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-03) Kerr, William R.; Ghani, Ejaz; Segura, Alex
India's manufacturing growth from 1989 to 2010 displays two intriguing properties: 1) a substantial fraction of absolute and net employment growth is concentrated in informal tradable industries, and 2) much of this growth is connected to the development of one-person establishments. This paper investigates the causes and determinants of these growth patterns. The rapid urbanization of the informal sector plays the strongest role, while there is some evidence for subcontracting by the formal sector and a "push" entrepreneurship story. The paper also finds modest connections of this growth to rising female labor force participation. The connection between the presence of informal manufacturing and local productivity levels is strong, and varies across urban and rural areas in ways that bolster urbanization and subcontracting hypotheses.
Effects of Land Misallocation on Capital Allocations in India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10) Duranton, Gilles; Ghani, Ejaz; Goswami, Arti Grover; Kerr, William R.
Growing research and policy interest focuses on the misallocation of output and factors of production in developing economies. This paper considers the possible misallocation of financial loans. Using plant-level data on the organized and unorganized sectors, the paper describes the temporal, geographic, and industry distributions of financial loans. The focus of the analysis is the hypothesis that land misallocation might be an important determinant of financial misallocation (for example, because of the role of land as collateral against loans). Using district-industry variations, the analysis finds evidence to support this hypothesis, although it does not find a total reduction in the intensity of financial loans or those being given to new entrants. The analysis also considers differences by gender of business owners and workers in firms. Although potential early gaps for businesses with substantial female employment have disappeared in the organized sector, a sizeable and persistent gap remains in the unorganized sector.