Person:
Premand, Patrick
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Social protection,
Safety nets,
Employment,
Skills,
Early childhood development,
Impact evaluation,
Development economics
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Development Impact Evaluation Group, the World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
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.
Publication Search Results
1 - 9 of 9
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Publication
Poor Households' Productive Investments of Cash Transfers: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Niger
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-09)Cash transfer programs have spread rapidly as an instrument to raise household consumption and reduce poverty. Questions remain about the sustainability of cash transfer impacts in low-income settings such as Sub-Saharan Africa and, in particular, on whether cash transfers can foster productive investments in addition to raising immediate consumption among the very poor. This paper presents evidence that a cash transfer project in rural Niger induced investments in assets and productive activities that were sustained among the very poor 18 months after project completion. Results show lasting increases in livestock assets and participation in saving groups (tontines). Cash transfers also contributed to improved agricultural productivity, but no effects in terms of diversification of other household enterprises are found. Productive asset gains are, notably, largest among the poorest of the poor, suggesting that small regular cash transfers combined with enhanced saving mechanisms can relax constraints to asset accumulation among the extreme poor. -
Publication
Do Workfare Programs Live Up to Their Promises? Experimental Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)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. -
Publication
Efficiency, Legitimacy and Impacts of Targeting Methods: Evidence from an Experiment in Niger
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-04-18)The methods to select safety net beneficiaries are the subject of frequent policy debates. This paper presents the results from a randomized experiment analyzing how efficiency, legitimacy, and short-term program effectiveness vary across widely used targeting methods. The experiment was embedded in the roll-out of a national cash transfer program in Niger. Eligible villages were randomly assigned to have beneficiary households selected through community-based targeting, a proxy-means test, or a formula designed to identify the food-insecure. Proxy-means testing is found to outperform other methods in identifying households with lower consumption per capita. The methods perform similarly against other welfare benchmarks. Legitimacy is high across all methods, but local populations have a slight preference for formula-based approaches. Manipulation and information imperfections are found to affect community-based targeting, although triangulation across multiple selection committees mitigates the related risks. Finally, short-term program impacts on food security are largest among households selected by proxy-means testing. Overall, the differences in performance across targeting methods are small relative to the overall level of exclusion stemming from limited funding for social programs. -
Publication
Behavioral Change Promotion, Cash Transfers and Early Childhood Development: Experimental Evidence from a Government Program in a Low-Income Setting
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08)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. Local spillovers on parenting practices are also found. Moderate gains in children's socio-emotional development are observed, but there are no improvements in anthropometrics or cognitive development. Cash transfers alone do not alter parenting practices or improve early childhood development. Cash transfers improve welfare and food security at the household level, and the behavioral intervention induces intra-household reallocations toward children. -
Publication
Cote d'Ivoire Jobs Diagnostic: Employment, Productivity, and Inclusion for Poverty Reduction
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017)After a decade of crisis and stellar economic growth over the past five years, Côte d’Ivoire has now set its sight on becoming an emerging economy. Improving prospects for productive employment will be essential for socially sustainable growth and poverty reduction. The "Cote d'Ivoire Jobs Diagnostic: Employment, Productivity, and Inclusion for Poverty Reduction" report provides a comprehensive and multi-sectoral empirical analysis of employment challenges and opportunities to inform strategies and policy actions in Côte d’Ivoire. The report aims to expand policy discussions on employment from a focus on the number of jobs and unemployment to a broader attention on the quality, productivity and inclusiveness of jobs. It makes the case for a jobs strategy with a sharper poverty lens that would focus on raising labor productivity in agriculture and informal off-farm employment to foster structural transformation, while, in parallel, pursuing longer-term goals of expanding the thin formal sector. -
Publication
Creating New Positions? Direct and Indirect Effects of a Subsidized Apprenticeship Program
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08)Evaluations of employment programs usually focus on direct impacts on participants. Yet employment programs can have a range of indirect effects that are rarely quantified. This paper analyzes the impact of a subsidized apprenticeship program offering dual on-the-job and theoretical training in Côte d'Ivoire. The experiment simultaneously randomized whether apprenticeship positions opened by firms were filled by the program, and whether interested youths were assigned to a formal apprenticeship. This design allows for estimating direct impacts on youths and indirect impacts on firms selected to host apprentices. The analysis identifies whether individuals forgo other employment or training opportunities, and whether firms replace other workers with program participants. The share of youths in apprenticeships increased by 52.8 percentage points. This estimate accounts for a significant windfall effect: 26 percent of the formal apprentices who were placed substituted out of traditional apprenticeships. The inflow of apprentices into firms increased significantly, but also induced substitution effects, as firms hired 0.23 fewer traditional apprentices per formal apprentice placed. Overall, the net number of apprenticeship positions created was between 51 and 74 percent of the number of formal apprentices placed. In the short term, impacts on earnings were not significant for youths, but firms benefited from an increase in the net value of work provided by apprentices. -
Publication
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)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. -
Publication
Do Cash Transfers Foster Resilience? Evidence from Rural Niger
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11)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. -
Publication
Contemporaneous and Post-Program Impacts of a Public Works Program: Evidence from Côte d'Ivoire
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05-23)Public works are one of the most popular safety net and employment policy instruments in thedeveloping world, despite limited evidence on their effectiveness and optimal design features.This paper presents results on contemporaneous and post-program impacts from a public worksintervention in Côte d'Ivoire. The program provided 7 months of temporary employment inroad maintenance to urban youths. Participants self-selected to apply for the public works jobs,which paid the formal minimum wage and were randomized among applicants. Randomizedsub-sets of beneficiaries also received complementary training on basic entrepreneurship or jobsearch skills. During the program, results show limited contemporaneous impacts of publicworks on the level of employment, but a shift in the composition of employment towards thebetter-paid public works wage jobs. A year after the end of the program, there are no lastingimpacts on the level or composition of employment, although positive impacts are observed onearnings through higher productivity in non-agricultural self-employment. Large heterogeneityin impacts are found, particularly during the program. Results from machine learningtechniques suggest potential trade-offs between maximizing contemporaneous and postprogramimpacts. Traditional heterogeneity analysis shows that a range of practical targetingmechanisms perform as well as the machine learning benchmark, leading to strongercontemporaneous and post-program benefits without sharp trade-offs. Overall, departing fromself-targeting based on the formal minimum wage would lead to strong improvements inprogram cost-effectiveness.