Person: Premand, Patrick
Development Impact Evaluation Group, the World Bank
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Social protection, Safety nets, Employment, Skills, Early childhood development, Impact evaluation, Development economics
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Development Impact Evaluation Group, the World Bank
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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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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
Publication Do Cash Transfers Foster Resilience? Evidence from Rural Niger(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11) Stoeffler, Quentin; Premand, PatrickPolicy 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 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, PatrickSigns 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 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, RenosDespite 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.Publication Transfers, Diversification and Household Risk Strategies : Experimental Evidence with Lessons for Climate Change Adaptation(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04) Macours, Karen; Premand, Patrick; Vakis, RenosWhile 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 Efficiency, Legitimacy and Impacts of Targeting Methods: Evidence from an Experiment in Niger(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-04-18) Schnitzer, Pascale; Premand, PatrickThe 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 Efficiency, Legitimacy, and Impacts of Targeting Methods: Evidence from an Experiment in Niger(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-09-08) Premand, PatrickThe methods to select safety net beneficiaries are the subject of frequent debates. Targeting assessments usually focus on efficiency by documenting the pre-program profile of selected beneficiaries. This study provides a more comprehensive analysis of targeting performance through an experiment embedded in a national cash transfer program in Niger. Eligible villages were randomly assigned to have beneficiary households selected by community-based targeting (CBT), proxy-means testing (PMT), or a formula to identify the food-insecure (FCS). The study considers targeting legitimacy and the impact of targeting choice on program effectiveness based on data collected after program roll-out. PMT is more efficient in identifying households with lower consumption per capita. Nonbeneficiaries find formula-based methods (PMT and FCS) more legitimate than CBT. Manipulation and information imperfections affect CBT, which can explain why it is not the most legitimate. Program impacts on some welfare dimensions are larger among households selected by PMT than CBT.Publication 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, PatrickSigns 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.