Person:
Ranzani, Marco
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Fields of Specialization
Development and labor economics
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Last updated
June 8, 2023
Biography
Marco Ranzani is a senior economist in the Middle East and Africa region of the Poverty and Equity Global Practice, at the World Bank. His research focuses on linkages between economic growth and labor markets, poverty and inequality. Previously, he served as economist in the Africa region for Comoros, Mauritius, and Seychelles, as consultant for the Poverty Reduction Anchor of the PREM network, as researcher at Understanding Children Work, an inter-agency research cooperation initiative involving the International Labour Organization, UNICEF and the World Bank, and as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bergamo, Italy. He holds a BA in Economics and a PhD in Public Economics from the Catholic University of Milan, Italy.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 11
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Publication
Rent Imputation for Welfare Measurement : A Review of Methodologies and Empirical Findings
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-11)As well acknowledged in the literature, housing is often the dominant consumption good for most households. As such, it should be included in a comprehensive welfare aggregate to measure people's living standards accurately. However, assigning a value to the flow of the dwelling for homeowners and nonmarket tenants is problematic. Over the last decades several estimation techniques have been proposed and implemented by practitioners covering from very simple to sophisticated approaches. This paper provides an extensive review of different methods to impute rent, commonly used for welfare analysis. It also gives an overview of how this problem has been addressed by other economic domains, namely national accounts, price indices, purchasing power parities, and taxation. Finally, after setting up a theoretical framework, the paper summarizes the empirical findings about the distributional impact of including imputed rents in welfare aggregates. -
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Internal Migration and Household Consumption in Ghana
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)Over the past two decades Ghana has seen a rapid increase in internal migration. Census data show that internal migration increased from 38.6 percent to 43.3 percent between 2000 and 2010. According to the latest Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) 2012/13, half of the migrants surveyed had migrated after 2003. -
Publication
The Impact of Public Employment on Labor Market Performance: Evidence from African Countries
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-05-26)Using census data for Ghana, Mali and Mozambique, we study the long-term impact of public sector employment on local labor markets. We find that the public sector crowds out private employment and induces skilled workers to queue for a public job, thus increasing their unemployment rate. In addition, a growing public sector fosters employment in the tradable and nontradable sectors, remarkably for the unskilled, and the reallocation of unskilled workers away from agriculture. -
Publication
Making Work Pay in Nicaragua : Employment, Growth, and Poverty Reduction
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008)The objective of this report is to provide some policy guidelines for the fight against poverty. In particular, it hopes to be able to identify the growing sectors, as well as the constraints faced by the poor in benefiting from this growth. The report is part of a series of studies conducted within the Poverty Reduction Group (PRMPR) to foster understanding of the role of employment earnings and labor markets in shared growth. In addition, it is intended to function as a background document for the World Bank's Nicaragua Poverty Assessment 2007. The degree to which growth is able to translate into poverty reduction depends on how its benefits are distributed among different segments of society. There is little doubt that growth measured by changes in average income contributes significantly to poverty reduction. However, it is also clear that countries differ in the degree to which income growth spells have translated into poverty reduction. Although differences in the responsiveness of poverty to income growth account for a small fraction of the overall differences in poverty changes across countries, from the point of view of an individual country, these differences may have significant implications for poverty reduction, especially in the short term. -
Publication
Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Internal Migration and Household Welfare in Ghana
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-07)This papers investigates to what extent internal migration contributes to improving households' welfare in Ghana. Using the most recent and nationally representative household survey (Ghana Living Standards Survey 2012/13), the estimates indicate that on average migration increases consumption significantly, and the effect is driven by households migrating from inland regions to the coastal areas of the country. The analysis also finds heterogeneous effects by gender and educational attainment, with migrant households headed by males and highly educated individuals faring significantly better than migrant households headed by females and low-educated individuals. The paper shows convincing evidence that the positive impact of migration on consumption is attributable to a physical mobility effect rather than changes in labor force status or sector of economic activity. However, the migration process in Ghana has important downsides, such as the brain drain and disruption of the social fabric in the communities originating migration. Future research in this area is warranted to have a more comprehensive picture of the social impact of migration in Ghana. -
Publication
Minimum Wages and Labor Supply in an Emerging Market: The Case of Mauritius
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-12)This paper investigates the effect of multiple minimum wages, known as remuneration orders, on employment and working hours in Mauritius. Using data between 2004 and 2014, the analysis indicates that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wages brings about a slightly positive effect on employment in the covered sector, with an estimated employment elasticity of 0.113, which is within the range of elasticities found in previous studies of employment effects of minimum wages in low- and middle-income countries. The positive employment effect of minimum wages is also associated with a 2.3 percent increase in average working hours for men but a 1.8 percent decline in average working hours for women in the covered sector. In the uncovered sector, the significant positive effect along the intensive margin, estimated at 4.2 percent, is driven by changes in labor supply among men. -
Publication
Evaluating the Accuracy of Homeowner Self-Assessed Rents in Peru
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-08)Attributing a rental value to the dwellings of homeowners is essential in various contexts, including distributional analysis and the compilation of national accounts, consumer price indexes (CPIs), and purchasing power parity indexes. One of the methods for making the attribution is to use homeowner estimates of the market rental value they would pay (receive) for their dwellings if these were rented. This is known as homeowner self-assessed rent. However, homeowner estimates may not be accurate because of the way questions aimed at soliciting such information are phrased, the sentimental attachment of the homeowners to the properties, lack of information about rental markets, and other reasons. Yet, researchers and practitioners often neglect to ascertain the accuracy of homeowner assessments. This study argues that comparing unconditional or conditional means may be misleading if one has not ascertained whether the observable characteristics of homeowner and tenant dwellings are similar. Using Peruvian data from 2003 to 2017, the study tests the accuracy of self-assessed rental values with matching estimators. In Metropolitan Lima, homeowners typically provide accurate estimates of the rental market values of their dwellings. In rural areas, market rental values are underestimated by homeowners in more instances. The direction and magnitude of the inaccuracies in Metropolitan Lima and in rural areas are comparable and range between −25 percent and −20 percent. -
Publication
Supporting Job Search for Mauritian Youth with Little Education
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08)Boosting shared prosperity also means including disadvantaged groups in the labor market. While many factors can hinder labor force participation, behavioral factors have emerged as key barriers in the case of Mauritian youth with little education. This Note describes the results of an intervention that delivered training on job search, goal setting, and planning skills to a group of young job-seekers with low educational attainment in Mauritius. While the intervention had to be interrupted due to the COVID-19 outbreak, preliminary results show encouraging positive impacts for youth employability and job search behaviors, and point to useful lessons. -
Publication
Housing, Imputed Rent, and Households' Welfare
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-08)Housing is the largest durable good consumed by households. As such, any consumption-based measure of welfare, to be comprehensive, must include the value of the flow of services households derive from their dwellings, the so-called imputed rent. However, estimating imputed rents is a daunting task, which researchers and practitioners tend to overlook. This paper is the first attempt to assess the distributional impact of including housing in the welfare aggregate; the paper tests two estimation methods and analyzes four developing countries. The distributional impact cannot be predicted a priori, and evidence suggests it is context and method specific. Although changes in poverty and inequality are always statistically significant, they are only occasionally larger than one percentage point. By contrast, shared prosperity exhibits sizable changes, which might also determine international re-rankings. Albeit the inclusion of imputed rents reshuffles the set of poor households, observed changes in the socioeconomic profiling of the poor are unlikely to affect pro-poor policy design. -
Publication
Living Standards of Tunisian Households in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03)The COVID-19 pandemic has had unprecedented negative socioeconomic effects on the lives of millions of people across the world, particularly among the most vulnerable groups. The COVID-19 outbreak has exacerbated the issues countries were facing before the pandemic such as the unequal access to basic services, markets, labor, and capital. Using five rounds of high-frequency telephone surveys collected by the Tunisian National Institute of Statistics in collaboration with the World Bank, this paper analyzes the deterioration in households’ welfare due to COVID-19, focusing on changes in the labor market. The results show that although employment has now rebounded to pre-crisis levels among the respondents, labor income among wage workers and particularly the self-employed is still below pre-pandemic levels. More than half of the households interviewed report a worsening of their living standards relative to before the start of the pandemic, and for about 40 percent of the poorest, welfare levels have continued to deteriorate. In addition, price increases and a reduction in remittances threaten to undo the progress that has been achieved in raising living standards. While waiting for the economy to rebound, the most vulnerable households will continue to need income support.