Person:
Umapathi, Nithin

Social Protection and Labor Global Practice, World Bank
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Fields of Specialization
Social assistance, Energy subsidies, Social insurance, Labor markets, Income transfers
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ORCID
0000-0001-8452-3201
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Social Protection and Labor Global Practice, World Bank
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Last updated: October 11, 2023
Biography

Nithin Umapthai works on the welfare state design spanning the design of income transfers, social insurance, and labor market interventions. He co-authored the EAP flagship report on Aging in East Asia and Pacific and has written on wide-ranging topics, including on social protection, education, early childhood interventions, and econometrics of program evaluation. He has published in peer reviewed journals such as Journal of Applied Econometrics, World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of African Economies, Journal of Development Effectiveness, Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies and Asia Pacific Viewpoint. Over the last few years he has been active in advisory and technical assistance roles in supporting energy subsidy reforms. 

Citations 49 Scopus

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Subject: RURAL AREAS × Topic: Health, Nutrition and Population ×

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Improving Nutritional Status through Behavioral Change : Lessons from Madagascar
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-12) Galasso, Emanuela; Umapathi, Nithin
    This paper provides evidence of the effects of a large-scale intervention that focuses on the quality of nutritional and child care inputs during the early stages of life. The empirical strategy uses a combination of double-difference and weighting estimators in a longitudinal survey to address the purposive placement of participating communities and estimate the effect of the availability of the program at the community level on nutritional outcomes. The authors find that the program helped 0-5 year old children in the participating communities to bridge the gap in weight for age z-scores and the incidence of underweight. The program also had significant effects in protecting long-term nutritional outcomes (height for age z-scores and incidence of stunting) against an underlying negative trend in the absence of the program. Importantly, the effect of the program exhibits substantial heterogeneity: gains in nutritional outcomes are larger for more educated mothers and for villages with better infrastructure. The program enables the analysis to isolate responsiveness to information provision and disentangle the effect of knowledge in the education effect on nutritional outcomes. The results are suggestive of important complementarities among child care, maternal education, and community infrastructure.
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    Robustness of Subjective Welfare Analysis in a Poor Developing Country: Madagascar 2001
    (World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-01) Paternostro, Stefano; Lokshin, Michael; Umapathi, Nithin
    The authors analyze the subjective perceptions of poverty in Madagascar in 2001 and their relationship to objective poverty indicators. They base their analysis on survey responses to a series of subjective perception questions. The authors extend the existing empirical methodology for estimating subjective poverty lines on the basis of categorical consumption adequacy questions. Based on this methodology they calculate the household-specific, subjective poverty lines and compare the poverty profiles derived from different subjective welfare questions. The results show that the aggregate poverty measures derived from consumption adequacy questions accord quite well with the poverty measures based on objective poverty lines. The subjective welfare analysis can be used in poor developing countries for evaluating socioeconomic and distributional impacts of various policy interventions.
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    Average and Marginal Returns to Upper Secondary Schooling in Indonesia
    (2011-11-01) Carneiro, Pedro; Lokshin, Michael; Ridao-Cano, Cristobal; Umapathi, Nithin
    This paper estimates average and marginal returns to schooling in Indonesia using a non-parametric selection model estimated by local instrumental variables, and data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. The analysis finds that the return to upper secondary schooling varies widely across individual: it can be as high as 50 percent per year of schooling for those very likely to enroll in upper secondary schooling, or as low as -10 percent for those very unlikely to do so. Returns to the marginal student (14 percent) are well below those for the average student attending upper secondary schooling (27 percent).