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 - 10 of 16
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Publication
Entrepreneurship Training and Self-Employment among University Graduates : Evidence from a Randomized Trial In Tunisia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-12)In economies characterized by low labor demand and high rates of youth unemployment, entrepreneurship training has the potential to enable youth to gain skills and create their own jobs. This paper presents experimental evidence on a new entrepreneurship track that provides business training and personalized coaching to university students in Tunisia. Undergraduates in the final year of licence appliquee were given the opportunity to graduate with a business plan instead of following the standard curriculum. This paper relies on randomized assignment of the entrepreneurship track to identify impacts on labor market outcomes one year after graduation. The analysis finds that the entrepreneurship track was effective in increasing self-employment among applicants, but that the effects are small in absolute terms. In addition, the employment rate among participants remains unchanged, pointing to a partial substitution from wage employment to self-employment. The evidence shows that the program fostered business skills, expanded networks, and affected a range of behavioral skills. Participation in the entrepreneurship track also heightened graduates optimism toward the future shortly after the Tunisian revolution. -
Publication
Can Unemployed Youth Create Their Own Jobs? The Tunisia Business Plan Thesis Competition
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-03)Tunisia, like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in general, has long experienced unemployment, particularly among young university graduates. Unfortunately, job creation in existing enterprises is not sufficient to absorb a growing stream of graduates, and this tendency is unlikely to change in the short run. A recent Health District (HD) project is therefore trying to teach university graduates to create their own jobs. The business plan thesis competition uses the undergrad thesis writing process to teach students to create an enterprise project and write a business plan. Apart from professors, private sector coaches mentor the students. Completed theses are submitted to a competition, whose winners receive financial support and further coaching to incubate the enterprise. First results from the baseline survey and accompanying qualitative interviews show the passionate take-up of the program and warrant cautious optimism regarding the emergence of an entrepreneurial culture. The recent events in the MENA region, which first unleashed in Tunisia, have side action supported by the Tunisian employment Development Policy Lending (DPL). -
Publication
Entrepreneurship Education and Entry into Self-Employment among University Graduates
(Elsevier, 2016-01)Entrepreneurship education has the potential to enable youth to gain skills and create their own jobs. In Tunisia, a curricular reform created an entrepreneurship track providing business training and coaching to help university students prepare a business plan. We rely on randomized assignment of the entrepreneurship track to identify impacts on students’ labor market outcomes one year after graduation. The entrepreneurship track led to a small increase in self-employment, but overall employment rates remained unchanged. Although business skills improved, effects on personality and entrepreneurial traits were mixed. The program nevertheless increased graduates’ aspirations toward the future. -
Publication
Transfers, Diversification and Household Risk Strategies : Experimental Evidence with Lessons for Climate Change Adaptation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)While climate change is likely to increase weather risks in many developing countries, there is little evidence on effective policies to facilitate adaptation. 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 related to changes in rainfall and temperature patterns. It combined a conditional cash transfer with vocational training or a productive investment grant. The authors identify the relative impact of each complementary package based on randomized assignment, and analyze how impacts vary by exposure to exogenous drought shocks. The results show that both complementary interventions provide full protection against drought shocks two years after the end of the intervention. Households that received the productive investment grant also had higher average consumption levels. The complementary interventions led to diversification of economic activities and better protection from shocks compared to beneficiaries of the basic conditional cash transfer and control households. These results show that combining safety nets with productive interventions can help households manage future weather risks and promote longer-term program impacts. -
Publication
Social Accountability and Service Delivery: Experimental Evidence from Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-05)Corruption and mismanagement of public resources can affect the quality of government services and undermine growth. Can citizens in poor communities be empowered to demand better-quality public investments? This paper looks at whether providing social accountability training and information on project performance can lead to improvements in local development projects. It finds that offering communities a combination of training and information on project quality leads to significant improvements in household welfare. However, providing either social accountability training or project quality information by itself has no welfare effect. These results are concentrated in areas that are reported by local officials as more corrupt or mismanaged. The impacts appear to come from community members increasing their monitoring of local projects, making more complaints to local and central officials, and cooperating more. The paper also finds modest improvements in people's trust in the central government. The study is unique in its size and integration in a national program. The results suggest that government-led, large-scale social accountability programs can strengthen communities' ability to improve service delivery. -
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
Constraints to Productive Employment Faced by Safety Nets Beneficiaries in the Sahel: Results of a Multi-Country Qualitative Assessment
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)In the Sahel subregion, which extends over Central and Western Africa, low labor productivity poses a challenge to poverty reduction, economic growth, and social stability. Social Safety Net Projects target the poorest households who derive their livelihoods from low-productivity activities. As such, they have the potential to improve labor productivity. As part of the Sahel adaptive social protection program (ASPP), the World Bank supports the design and implementation of productive accompanying measures for safety nets beneficiaries. This report sets out the results of a qualitative assessment of the constraints to productive employment that was conducted in the Social Safety Net Project areas, across five of the six countries covered by the ASPP: Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Chad. This assessment identified the main challenges to productivity growth in farm and nonfarm sectors and, jointly with other surveys and local and regional consultations, helped define accompanying measures to safety nets programs aimed at increasing current employment productivity and generating more productive jobs. -
Publication
The Medium-Term Impact of Entrepreneurship Education on Labor Market Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from University Graduates in Tunisia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01)Despite the widespread popularity of entrepreneurship education, there is thin evidence on its effectiveness in improving employment outcomes over the medium to long term. A potential time lag between entrepreneurial intentions and actions is sometimes presented as a reason why employment impacts are rarely observed. Based on a randomized control trial among university students in Tunisia, this paper studies the medium-term impacts of entrepreneurship education four years after students' graduation. The paper complements earlier evidence that documented small, short-term impacts on entry into self-employment and aspirations toward the future one year after graduation. The medium-term results show that the impacts of entrepreneurship education were short-lived. There are no sustained impacts on self-employment or employment outcomes four years after graduation. There are no lasting effects on latent entrepreneurship either, and the short-term increase in optimism also receded. -
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.