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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Document Type: Publications & Research × Sub-Saharan Africa: Africa demographic transition × Topic: Communities and Human Settlements ×

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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.