Person:
Premand, Patrick

Development Impact Evaluation Group, the World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Social protection, Safety nets, Employment, Skills, Early childhood development, Impact evaluation, Development economics

ORCID

0000-0002-7447-5995

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RePEc
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Development Impact Evaluation Group, the World Bank

Last updated: June 28, 2024

Biography

Patrick Premand is a Senior Economist in the Development Impact Evaluation Group (DIME) in the research Vice-Presidency at the World Bank. He works on Social Protection and Safety Nets; Jobs, Economic Inclusion and Entrepreneurship; and Early Childhood Development. He conducts impact evaluations and policy experiments of social protection, jobs and human development programs. He often works on government-led interventions implemented at scale, in close collaboration with policymakers and researchers. He has led policy dialogue and technical assistance activities, as well as worked on the design, implementation and management of a range of World Bank operations. He previously held various positions at the World Bank, including in the Social Protection & Jobs group in Africa, the Human Development Economics Unit of the Africa region, the Office of the Chief Economist for Human Development, and the Poverty Unit of the Latin America and Caribbean region. He holds a DPhil in Economics from Oxford University.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 27

How Culturally Wise Psychological Interventions Help Reduce Poverty
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-28) Thomas, Catherine; Premand, Patrick; Bossuroy, Thomas; Abdoulaye Sambo, Soumaila; Markus, Hazel; Walton, Gregory
Poverty is multidimensional, associated not only with a lack of financial resources, but also often social-psychological constraints, such as diminished agency and aspirations. Through a series of field experiments, this paper assesses the causal impacts of culturally wise interventions designed to build women’s agency on poverty reduction efforts in rural Niger. Moreover, the study identifies a model of agency that is “culturally wise” because it is the most motivational and functional in the study cultural context. Study 1 reports descriptive evidence that an interdependent model of agency—that is grounded in social harmony, respect, and collective advancement and that accounts for relational affordances for individual goals—is predominant in rural Niger. This stands in contrast to a more self-oriented, independent model grounded in personal aspirations, self-direction, and self-advancement that is more common in the West. Study 2 explores the psychosocial mechanisms of a highly effective, multifaceted poverty reduction program that included two psychosocial interventions—a community sensitization and a life skills training, which incorporated both models of agency. Although the results support the role of intrapersonal processes (including enhanced self-efficacy and optimistic future expectations) in driving economic impacts, there is equal, if not greater, support for relational processes (including increased subjective social standing, control over earnings, and social support). Study 3 conducts a mechanism experiment to disentangle the causal effects of interventions grounded in independent agency (“personal initiative”) or interdependent agency (“interpersonal initiative”). The results show that the interdependent agency intervention, which is considered to be most “culturally wise,” led to significant effects on economic outcomes as well as both intrapersonal and relational processes. By contrast, the independent agency intervention showed impacts on intrapersonal processes alone. These findings show the promise of an emerging area of research at the intersection of behavioral science, cultural psychology, and development economics for addressing complex global problems like poverty and inequality.
Savings Facilitation or Capital Injection?: Impacts and Spillovers of Livelihood Interventions in Post-Conflict Côte d’Ivoire
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-09-12) Marguerie, Alicia; Premand, Patrick
Policy makers grapple with the optimal design of multidimensional strategies to improve poor households’ livelihoods. To address financial constraints, are capital injections needed, or is savings mobilization sufficient This paper tests the direct effects and local spillovers of three instruments to relax financial constraints, each combined with micro-entrepreneurship training. “Cash grants” and “cash grants with repayment” directly inject capital, while “village savings and loan associations” (VSLAs) promote more efficient group saving. The randomized controlled trial took place in western regions of Côte d’Ivoire that were affected by a post-electoral crisis in 2011 and an earlier conflict. The interventions had differential effects on the dynamics of savings and productive asset accumulation. The cash grant modalities generated investments in startup capital, although nearly 30 percent of the grant was saved. In contrast, village savings and loan associations did not increase total savings but gradually induced investments, so that productive assets caught up with cash grant recipients after 15 months. Positive local spillovers on savings and independent activities were also observed. Yet, investments in independent activities were not sufficient to increase profits, possibly because they were limited due to high precautionary saving motives in the post-conflict study setting.
Do Public Works Programs Have Sustained Impacts?: A Review of Experimental Studies from LMICs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-06-27) Bagga, Aanchal; Holmlund, Marcus; Khan, Nausheen; Mani, Subha; Mvukiyehe, Eric; Premand, Patrick
Many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have introduced public works programs that offer temporary cash-for-work opportunities to poor individuals. This paper reviews experimental evidence on the impacts of public works programs on participants over the short and medium run, providing new insights on whether they have sustained impacts. The findings show that public works mainly increase employment and earnings during the program. Short-term positive effects tend to fade in the medium run, except in a few cases in which large impacts on savings or investments in self-employment activities are also observed. Importantly, the estimated impacts on earnings are much lower than planned transfer amounts due to forgone earnings, raising questions about cost-effectiveness. There is also little evidence of public works programs improving food consumption expenditure. The review finds evidence of improvements in psychological well-being and women’s empowerment in some cases, but not systematically, and with limitations in measurement. The paper concludes by outlining directions for future research.
Behavioral Change Promotion, Cash Transfers and Early Childhood Development: Experimental Evidence from a Government Program in a Low-Income Setting
(Elsevier, 2022-06-26) Premand, Patrick
Signs of development delays and malnutrition are widespread among young children in low-income settings. Social protection programs such as cash transfers are increasingly combined with behavioral change promotion or parenting interventions to improve early childhood development. This paper disentangles the effects of behavioral change promotion from cash transfers to poor households through an experiment embedded in a government program in Niger. The study is also designed to identify within-community spillovers from the behavioral change intervention. The findings show that behavioral change promotion affects a range of practices related to nutrition, health, stimulation, and child protection. Moderate gains in children’s socio-emotional development are observed, but there is no improvement in anthropometrics or cognitive development. Cash transfers alone do not alter parenting practices or improve early childhood development. Cash transfers raise food security and consumption at the household level, including the purchase of non-food items privately consumed by adults. The behavioral intervention offsets these changes and instead improves children’s food security, pointing to some intra-household reallocations toward children. Local spillovers on parenting practices are found, which further highlights that cash alone is not the main driver of changes in parenting behaviors.
Tackling psychosocial and capital constraints to alleviate poverty
(Springer Nature, 2022-04-27) Bossuroy, Thomas; Goldstein, Markus; Karimou, Bassirou; Karlan, Dean; Kazianga, Harounan; Pariente, William; Premand, Patrick; Thomas, Catherine C.; Udry, Christopher; Vaillant, Julia; Wright, Kelsey A.
Many policies attempt to help extremely poor households build sustainable sources of income. Although economic interventions have predominated historically 1,2, psychosocial support has attracted substantial interest 3,4,5, particularly for its potential cost-effectiveness. Recent evidence has shown that multi-faceted ‘graduation’ programs can succeed in generating sustained changes 6,7. Here we show that a multi-faceted intervention can open pathways out of extreme poverty by relaxing capital and psychosocial constraints. We conducted a four-arm randomized evaluation among extremely poor female beneficiaries already enrolled in a national cash transfer government program in Niger. The three treatment arms included group savings promotion, coaching and entrepreneurship training, and then added either a lump-sum cash grant, psychosocial interventions, or both the cash grant and psychosocial interventions. All three arms generated positive effects on economic outcomes and psychosocial well-being, but there were notable differences in the pathways and the timing of effects. Overall, the arms with psychosocial interventions were the most cost-effective, highlighting the value of including well-designed psychosocial components in government-led multi-faceted interventions for the extreme poor.
Transfers, Diversification and Household Risk Strategies: Can productive safety nets help households manage climatic variability?
(Oxford University Press, 2022-03-30) Macours, Karen; Premand, Patrick; Vakis, Renos
Despite increasing climatic variability and frequent weather shocks in many developing countries, there is little evidence on effective policies that help poor agricultural households manage risk. This paper presents experimental evidence on a program in rural Nicaragua aimed at improving households’ risk-management through income diversification. The intervention targeted agricultural households exposed to weather shocks and combined a one-year conditional cash transfer with vocational training or a productive investment grant. We identify the relative impact of each complementary package based on randomized assignment and analyse how impacts vary by exposure to exogenous drought shocks. The results show that both complementary interventions provide protection against weather shocks two years after the programme ended. Households that received the productive investment grant also had higher average consumption levels. The complementary interventions facilitated income smoothing and diversification of economic activities, as such offering better protection from shocks compared to beneficiaries of the basic conditional cash transfer and control households. Relaxing capital constraints induced investments in non-agricultural businesses, while relaxing skills constraints increased wage work and migration in response to shocks. These results show that combining safety nets with productive interventions relaxing skill or capital constraints can help households become more resilient and manage climatic variability.
Do Workfare Programs Live Up to Their Promises? Experimental Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04) Bertrand, Marianne; Crepon, Bruno; Marguerie, Alicia; Premand, Patrick
Workfare programs are one of the most popular social protection and employment policy instruments in the developing world. They evoke the promise of efficient targeting, as well as immediate and lasting impacts on participants’ employment, earnings, skills and behaviors. This paper evaluates contemporaneous and post-program impacts of a public works intervention in Côte d’Ivoire. The program was randomized among urban youths who self-selected to participate and provided seven months of employment at the formal minimum wage. Randomized subsets of beneficiaries also received complementary training on basic entrepreneurship or job search skills. During the program, results show limited impacts on the likelihood of employment, but a shift toward wage jobs, higher earnings and savings, as well as changes in work habits and behaviors. Fifteen months after the program ended, savings stock remain higher, but there are no lasting impacts on employment or behaviors, and only limited impacts on earnings. Machine learning techniques are applied to assess whether program targeting can improve. Significant heterogeneity in impacts on earnings is found during the program but not post-program. Departing from self-targeting improves performance: a range of practical targeting mechanisms achieve impacts close to a machine learning benchmark by maximizing contemporaneous impacts without reducing post-program impacts. Impacts on earnings remain substantially below program costs even under improved targeting.
Pathways Out of Extreme Poverty: Tackling Psychosocial and Capital Constraints with a Multi-faceted Social Protection Program in Niger
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03) Bossuroy, Thomas; Goldstein, Markus; Karlan, Dean; Kazianga, Harounan; Pariente, William; Premand, Patrick; Thomas, Catherine; Udry, Christopher; Vaillant, Julia; Wright, Kelsey
This paper analyzes a four-arm randomized evaluation of a multi-faceted economic inclusion intervention delivered by the Government of Niger to female beneficiaries of a national cash transfer program. All three treatment arms include a core package of group savings promotion, coaching, and entrepreneurship training, in addition to the regular cash transfers from the national program. The first variant also includes a lump-sum cash grant and is similar to a traditional graduation intervention (“capital” package). The second variant substitutes the cash grant with psychosocial interventions (“psychosocial” package). The third variant includes the cash grant and the psychosocial interventions (“full” package). The control group only receives the regular cash transfers from the national program. All three treatments generate large impacts on consumption and food security six and 18 months post-intervention. They increase participation and profits in women-led off-farm business and livestock activities, as well as improve various dimensions of psychosocial well-being. The impacts tend to be larger in the full treatment, followed by the capital and psychosocial treatments. Consumption impacts up to 18 months after the intervention already exceed costs in the psychosocial package (the benefit-cost ratio for the psychosocial package is 126 percent; full package, 95 percent; and capital package, 58 percent). These results highlight the value of addressing psychosocial constraints as well as capital constraints in government-implemented poverty reduction programs.
Texting Parents about Early Child Development: Behavioral Changes and Unintended Social Effects
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Barrera, Oscar; Macours, Karen; Premand, Patrick; Vakis, Renos
Parenting interventions have the potential to improve early childhood development. Text messages are considered a promising channel to deliver parenting information at large scale. This paper tests whether sending text messages about parenting practices impacts early childhood development. Households in rural Nicaragua were randomly assigned to receive messages about nutrition, health, stimulation, or the home environment. The intervention led to significant changes in self-reported parenting practices. However, it did not translate into improvements in children's cognitive development. When local opinion leaders were randomly exposed to the same text message intervention, parental investments declined and children's outcomes deteriorated. Since interactions between parents and leaders about child development also decreased, the negative effects may have resulted from a crowding-out of some local leaders.
Do Cash Transfers Foster Resilience? Evidence from Rural Niger
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11) Stoeffler, Quentin; Premand, Patrick
Policy makers are increasingly interested in strategies to promote resilience and mitigate the effects of future climatic shocks. Cash transfer programs have had widely documented positive welfare impacts. They often also aim to offer protection against shocks, but their role in fostering resilience has been less studied. This paper assesses whether the beneficiaries of a multiyear government cash transfer program in rural Niger are better able to mitigate the welfare effects of drought shocks. It analyzes mechanisms through which cash transfers contribute to resilience, such as savings facilitation, asset accumulation, or income smoothing in agriculture and off-farm activities. It combines household survey data collected as part of a randomized control trial with satellite data used to identify exogenous rainfall shocks. The results show that cash transfers increase household consumption by about 10 percent on average. Importantly, this increase is mostly concentrated among households affected by drought shocks, for whom welfare impacts are larger than transfer amounts. Cash transfers increase savings. They also help households protect earnings in agriculture and off-farm businesses when shocks occur. Few differences in household durables or livestock are observed. Overall, these findings suggest that cash transfer programs targeting poor households can foster resilience by facilitating savings and income smoothing.