Person:
Ghorpade, Yashodhan

Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice

Fields of Specialization

Social protection, Poverty, Conflict

Departments

Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice

Last updated: August 23, 2024

Biography

Yashodhan Ghorpade is an economist in the Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice of the World Bank. He joined the World Bank as a Young Professional in the Education – South Asia Team in 2016. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex UK, where his research focused on the microeconomic effects of conflict and natural disasters on households in Pakistan. His research interests include the microeconomic analysis of conflict, household behavior and policy interventions in response to shocks, and child labor. He has previously worked with the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Institute of Development Studies (UK), the ILO Child Labour Program, Oxford Policy Management Ltd., and the India and Myanmar country offices of the World Bank

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

High-Skilled Migration from Myanmar: Responses to Signals of Political and Economic Stabilization
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-21) Ghorpade, Yashodhan; Imtiaz, Muhammad Saad; Han, Theingie
In recent years, Myanmar has witnessed considerable economic and political instability, leading many young people, particularly the higher-skilled, to consider migrating abroad for improved prospects. This paper employs an innovative method to quantify migration intentions among high-skilled youth by analyzing the take-up of migration at different wage premia. A randomized survey experiment then evaluates how hypothetical political and economic stabilization scenarios impact these intentions. The findings show that 35 percent of the respondents would be willing to take a similar job abroad for pay equal to their current income. Randomization within the survey indicates that political stabilization would potentially reduce high-skilled workers’ desire to migrate by about 15 percent, especially among men, those living in high-conflict areas, and persons with lower absolute income but higher perceived relative income. In contrast, prospects of economic stabilization do not have a significant effect on migration intentions. In the absence of political stability and a reduction in conflict, economic stabilization is unlikely to reduce talent outflows among the young.
Soft Skills, Competition, and Hiring Discrimination
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-18) Valencia, Christian; Janzen, Sarah; Ghorpade, Yashodhan; Abdur Rahman, Amanina
This paper conducts a correspondence study to assess demand for soft skills in the context of hiring discrimination in Malaysia. No evidence of gender-based discrimination is found, including in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics occupations. However, in line with previous studies in the same context, there is evidence of ethnic discrimination. The paper then test the relevance of two soft skills: leadership and teamwork. These tests find some evidence that the labor market rewards simple signals of teamwork for the average applicant. Teamwork also plays an important role in the context of labor market discrimination, reducing the discrimination gap by 40 percent. In contrast, signaling leadership skills has no effect. Last, the paper considers the role of labor market competition. Companies facing competition in the labor market, measured by the number of competitors advertising similar positions, are 56 to 66 percent less likely to discriminate. On the supply side, discrimination increases with the relative quality of the pool of applicants. The results provide novel evidence that soft skills and labor market competition both play important roles in understanding hiring discrimination. This underlines potential pathways to overcome labor market discrimination and improve job matching.
Social Insurance for Gig Workers: Insights from a Discrete Choice Experiment in Malaysia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-12-14) Ghorpade, Yashodhan; Jasmin, Alyssa
The rise of “gig” or digital platform work globally has led to both enthusiasm for its potential to create lucrative employment for large numbers of people, as well as concern about its implications for worker protection that is often provided in more standard employment. While gig work platforms may not be akin to employers in standard work relationships, arrangements that do not obligate them to provide worker protection and social insurance contributions may leave several platform workers unprotected against a range of risks. Is the observed lack of protection among digital platform workers explained by an unwillingness on part of the workers themselves to make necessary contributions for social insurance coverage? This paper analyzes this question in the context of Malaysia, a rapidly growing upper-middle-income East Asian economy that has witnessed a rise in gig work in recent years. The paper deploys a novel vignette-based experiment to ascertain gig workers’ willingness to pay for social insurance coverage. The analysis finds overall a large unmet need for social insurance among gig workers, as well as a high level of willingness to pay for (especially) unemployment insurance, retirement savings, and accidental and injury insurance. This implies that the policy challenge is to channel such willingness into regular contributions for social insurance coverage through relevant and flexible options for contributions. More than subsidies, this segment of the workforce could perhaps benefit from better tailored, more flexible, and more easily accessible instruments for social insurance. The analysis also finds evidence of substitution between distinct insurance instruments. For instance, those who have access to retirement savings appear to be less willing to pay for unemployment insurance, and those with private medical insurance are less likely to contribute to the state-run injury insurance scheme. This underlines the need to approach risk insurance for digital platform workers more holistically and to consider a wider range of insurance instruments, including those offered by the private sector.
The Valuation of Flexible Work Arrangements: Insights from a Discrete Choice Experiment in Malaysia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-12-14) Ghorpade, Yashodhan; Abdur Rahman, Amanina
The changing nature of work, accelerated by the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in several fundamental shifts in the terms and conditions of work. Along with the clear trend of increased nonstandard employment, including through the gig economy and platform work, this poses critical questions for policies and practices of the organization of work arrangements, and about who may bear the costs of emerging arrangements. This paper explores whether workers in freelancing and standard work arrangements in Malaysia view a trade-off between flexibility and income and are willing to forgo a share of earnings for greater flexibility. The paper deploys a novel discrete choice experiment in which respondents are asked to choose their preferred job from two hypothetical job descriptions with randomly assigned attributes, namely, flexibility and associated earnings. The findings show substantial but not overwhelming preference for greater flexibility, especially among freelancers, and a clear trade-off between measures of flexibility and income. The findings also show considerable variation in the preference for flexibility, much of which is not explained by worker demographics and other observable characteristics but is consistent with other measures of the importance attached to flexibility and earning income. The analysis outlines pathways through which offering even a modicum of flexibility can enhance workers’ utility without necessarily increasing costs for employers, provides evidence of considerable preference heterogeneity, and warns against imposing uniform approaches to (in)flexible work arrangements.
Forewarned, but not Forearmed?: Lessons for the Recent Floods in Pakistan from 2010
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09) Ghorpade, Yashodhan
As climate change results in recurrent and more frequent natural disasters, each calamity proves instructional for the future. The author summarizes the lessons learned from the social protection and wider disaster response in the 2010 floods in Pakistan and discuss how they can benefit ongoing efforts to recover from the floods in the country in 2022, and other settings.
Social Protection at the Humanitarian-Development Nexus: Insights from Yemen
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04) Ammar, Ali; Ghorpade, Yashodhan
In its seventh year of conflict, facing successive shocks and a heightened risk of famine, Yemen has been termed the world’s ‘worst humanitarian crisis.’ Against this backdrop, there has been a drastic transformation of Yemen’s social protection landscape, with the disruption of several governmental SP programs, the continued functioning of some national institutions and a massive increase in humanitarian assistance programs. In this paper, authors first review conceptual differences between humanitarian and development assistance along several features, also noting the blurring of sharp distinctions. The authors then assess the institutional landscape of social assistance in Yemen, using a unique dataset authors collated using administrative data from a range of humanitarian and development agencies. The authors compare programs in terms of scale, geographical coverage, average benefit levels, and targeting. The authors find that while there are important differences between humanitarian and development approaches, there are also many areas of convergence. While the total number of people covered by all humanitarian and development assistance programs exceeds the national population, authors also find evidence of likely exclusion of many poor households, suggesting that there is significant scope to reduce exclusion through improved coordination. The paper concludes with a discussion of areas and specific proposals for enhanced humanitarian-development coordination in the social assistance space at the strategic, program, and delivery-systems levels.
Ready to Learn: Before School, In School, and Beyond School in South Asia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-02-19) Beteille, Tara; Tognatta, Namrata; Riboud, Michelle; Nomura, Shinsaku; Ghorpade, Yashodhan
Countries that have sustained rapid growth over decades have typically had a strong public commitment to expanding education as well as to improving learning outcomes. South Asian countries have made considerable progress in expanding access to primary and secondary schooling, with countries having achieved near-universal enrollment of the primary-school-age cohort (ages 6–11), except for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Secondary enrollment shows an upward trend as well. Beyond school, many more people have access to skill-improving opportunities and higher education today. Although governments have consistently pursued policies to expand access, a prominent feature of the region has been the role played by non-state actors—private nonprofit and for-profit entities—in expanding access at every level of education. Though learning levels remain low, countries in the region have shown a strong commitment to improving learning. All countries in South Asia have taken the first step, which is to assess learning outcomes regularly. Since 2010, there has been a rapid increase in the number of large-scale student learning assessments conducted in the region. But to use the findings of these assessments to improve schooling, countries must build their capacity to design assessments and analyze and use findings to inform policy.
Extending a Lifeline or Cutting Losses?: The Effects of Conflict on Household Receipts of Remittances in Pakistan
(Elsevier, 2017-11) Ghorpade, Yashodhan
The author examines the causal effects of long-term exposure to conflict, measured at the micro level, on households’ receipt of remittances, among households residing in areas affected by the 2010 floods in Pakistan. Using a dataset of 7802 households, representative of all flood-affected areas of Pakistan in 2010, IV estimation is employed to overcome the endogeneity of conflict exposure and remittance receipts, and control for a range of confounding factors. Contrary to the literature from country-level case studies, it is found that long-term exposure to conflict reduces households’ likelihood of receiving any remittances at all, as well as the average amounts of remittances received. However for households in the lowest food consumption expenditure quintile, conflict has a positive effect on the likelihood of remittance receipts, which provides evidence for the existence of heterogeneous effects as well as a significant micro–macro gap in understanding the causal effects of conflict on remittance receipts.
Can Rigorous Impact Evaluations Improve Humanitarian Assistance?
(Taylor and Francis, 2017-10-24) Puri, Jyotsna; Aladysheva, Anastasia; Iversen, Vegard; Ghorpade, Yashodhan; Bruck, Tilman
Each year billions of US-dollars of humanitarian assistance are mobilised in response to man-made emergencies and natural disasters. Yet, rigorous evidence for how best to intervene remains scant. This dearth reflects that rigorous impact evaluations of humanitarian assistance pose major methodological, practical and ethical challenges. While theory-based impact evaluations can crucially inform humanitarian programming, popular methods, such as orthodox RCTs, are less suitable. Instead, factorial designs and quasi-experimental designs can be ethical and robust, answering questions about how to improve the delivery of assistance. We argue that it helps to be prepared, planning impact evaluations before the onset of emergencies.
Regional Study on Targeting Systems and Practices : Draft Policy Note
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-06-28) Vasudeva Dutta, Puja; Sanchez-Paramo, Carolina; Ghorpade, Yashodhan
This policy note aims to take stock of regional experiences in the area of targeting, both in the context of government systems and the World Bank's operational work, in South Asia. The main objectives are to review targeting systems and practices in the context of government programs; to critically review the role for and impact of targeting in the WB's operational work; and to extract lessons that can be used to deepen the relevance and impact of the WB's operational work in South Asia. The evidence presented in this note will serve as a resource for those interested in and/or planning some work on targeting related work in the region. In this sense, by presenting information on both country systems and performance of WB-led work, the note targets both practitioners and managers. The analysis focuses first on the architecture of targeting systems in South Asia, and on the determinants of targeting effectiveness, including the choice and design of the targeting tool, implementation and monitoring of the targeting tool, and the design, implementation and monitoring of the targeted program. The note concludes that international evidence a large fraction of the observed differences in targeting effectiveness across systems and programs, can be attributed to factors related to implementation and monitoring. This implies that investments aimed at correcting resource, capacity and logistic limitations in government systems could go a long way in improving targeting outcomes in the region.