Premand, Patrick

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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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

Impact Evaluation in Practice, Second Edition
(Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank, 2016-09-13) Gertler, Paul J.; Martinez, Sebastian; Premand, Patrick; Rawlings, Laura B.; Vermeersch, Christel M. J.
The second edition of the Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policy makers and development practitioners. First published in 2011, it has been used widely across the development and academic communities. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing impact evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of impact evaluations and the best ways to use them to design evidence-based policies and programs. The updated version covers the newest techniques for evaluating programs and includes state-of-the-art implementation advice, as well as an expanded set of examples and case studies that draw on recent development challenges. It also includes new material on research ethics and partnerships to conduct impact evaluation. The handbook is divided into four sections: Part One discusses what to evaluate and why; Part Two presents the main impact evaluation methods; Part Three addresses how to manage impact evaluations; Part Four reviews impact evaluation sampling and data collection. Case studies illustrate different applications of impact evaluations. The book links to complementary instructional material available online, including an applied case as well as questions and answers. The updated second edition will be a valuable resource for the international development community, universities, and policy makers looking to build better evidence around what works in development.
Impact Evaluation in Practice, First Edition
(World Bank, 2011) Gertler, Paul J.; Martinez, Sebastian; Premand, Patrick; Rawlings, Laura B.; Vermeersch, Christel M. J.
The Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policymakers and development practitioners. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of the uses of impact evaluation and the best ways to use evaluations to design policies and programs that are based on evidence of what works most effectively. The handbook is divided into three sections: Part One discusses what to evaluate and why; Part Two outlines the theoretical underpinnings of impact evaluation; and Part Three examines how to implement an evaluation. Case studies illustrate different methods for carrying out impact evaluations.
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.
Poor Households' Productive Investments of Cash Transfers: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Niger
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-09) Stoeffler, Quentin; Mills, Bradford; Premand, Patrick
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.
Entrepreneurship Education and Entry into Self-Employment among University Graduates
(Elsevier, 2016-01) Premand, Patrick; Almeida, Rita; Barouni, Mahdi
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.
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.
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.
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) Bossuroy, Thomas; Koussoube, Estelle; Premand, Patrick
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.
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) Barry, Oumar; 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. 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.
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.