Gatti, Roberta

Person:
Gatti, Roberta

MENA Chief Economist Office

Fields of Specialization

LABOR ECONOMICS, POLITICAL ECONOMY, SOCIAL INCLUSION, ECONOMIC GROWTH

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MENA Chief Economist Office

Last updated May 17, 2023

Biography

Roberta Gatti is the World Bank’s chief economist of the Middle East and North Africa region and former chief economist of the Human Development Practice Group, where she led the SDI and the Human Capital Index initiatives. She joined the World Bank in 1998 as a Young Professional in the Development Research Group. Her research includes theoretical and empirical contributions to labor and household economics, political economy, growth, and social inclusion. She has authored multiple World Bank flagship reports, including Jobs for Shared Prosperity and Being Fair, Faring Better. She has taught at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 14

Child Labor : The Role of Income Variability and Access to Credit in a Cross-Section of Countries

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-01) Dehejia, Rajeev H. ; Gatti, Roberta

Even though access to credit is central to child labor theoretically, little work has been done to assess its importance empirically. Dehejia and Gatti examine the link between access to credit and child labor at a cross-country level. The authors measure child labor as a country aggregate, and proxy credit constraints by the level of financial market development. These two variables display a strong negative (unconditional) relationship. The authors show that even after they control for a wide range of variables-including GDP per capita, urbanization, initial child labor, schooling, fertility, legal institutions, inequality, and openness-this relationship remains strong and statistically significant. Moreover, they find that, in the absence of developed financial markets, households resort to child labor to cope with income variability. This evidence suggests that policies aimed at increasing households' access to credit could be effective in reducing child labor.
Child Labor, Income Shocks, and Access to Credit

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-06) Beegle, Kathleen ; Dehejia, Rajeev H. ; Gatti, Roberta

Although a growing theoretical literature points to credit constraints as an important source of inefficiently high child labor, little work has been done to assess its empirical relevance. Using panel data from Tanzania, the authors find that households respond to transitory income shocks by increasing child labor, but that the extent to which child labor is used as a buffer is lower when households have access to credit. These findings contribute to the empirical literature on the permanent income hypothesis by showing that credit-constrained households actively use child labor to smooth their income. Moreover, they highlight a potentially important determinant of child labor and, as a result, a mechanism that can be used to tackle it.
Decentralization and Corruption : Evidence across Countries

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000-02) Fisman, Raymond ; Gatti, Roberta

The relationship between decentralization of government activities and the extent of rent extraction by private parties is an important element in the recent debate on institutional design. The theoretical literature makes ambiguous predictions about this relationship, and it has remained virtually unexamined by empiricists. The authors make a first attempt at examining the issue empirically, by looking at the cross-country relationship between fiscal decentralization and corruption as measured by a number of different indices. Their estimates suggest that fiscal decentralization in government spending is significantly associated with lower corruption. Moreover, they find that the origin of a country's legal system - for example, civil versus common legal code - performs extremely well as an instrument for decentralization. The estimated relationship between decentralization, when so instrumented, and corruption is even stronger. The evidence suggests a number of interesting areas for future work, including investigating whether there are specific services for which decentralized provision has a particularly strong impact on political rent extraction, and understanding the channels through which decentralization succeeds in keeping corruption in check.
Labor Mobility in the Middle East and North Africa : Challenges and Opportunities

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-09) Brodmann, Stefanie ; Pouget, Yann ; Gatti, Roberta

Increased labor mobility bears large potential benefits for human development and poverty reduction through various channels including more competitive global labor markets and increased efficiency in the matching of skills supply and demand. Bank support for enhanced and better managed migration can complement broader efforts to reduce poverty and promote human development, similarly to how Bank projects on trade liberalization have helped in reducing market distortions and raise welfare. With Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries becoming increasingly eager to adopt a proactive approach to improve migration outcomes, cross-sectoral Bank teams are well positioned to respond to increasing demand for migration management systems. Labor mobility has proven to be a forceful driver of convergence in living standards. Estimates suggest that gains from the liberalization of migration could surpass welfare gains from trade liberalization. Currently, migration represents the main form of global and regional integration for MENA countries. In the future, increased labor mobility could foster regional economic integration, a recognized priority within the Arab World Initiative (AWI).
Investing in Human Capital: What Can We Learn from the World Bank's Portfolio Data?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01) Gatti, Roberta ; Mohpal, Aakash

This paper compiles project-level data from the World Bank's lending history to describe patterns and the composition of its portfolio. The paper focuses particularly on the effect of countries' transition from International Development Association to International Bank for Reconstruction and Development status, which marks the point when countries start borrowing at near market rates, on lending for human development sectors (education, health and social protection). Using country and year fixed effects, which account for unobservable country characteristics (for example, national priorities) and time effects (for example, market interest rates), the paper finds that human development lending decreases when countries graduate from the International Development Association. The average difference in the binary indicator of lending for any sector is 27 percent while it is 60 percent for human development sectors. The share of human development lending (lending by human development Global Practices over total lending) is also 6.9 percentage points (30 percent) lower. This decline in human development lending in International Bank for Reconstruction and Development countries is accompanied by a greater use of budget support. The results are robust to controlling for non-World Bank aid, as well as various alternative specifications and estimation samples.
Domestic Government Spending on Human Capital: A Cross-Country Analysis of Recent Trends

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10) Andrews, Kathryn ; Avitabile, Ciro ; Gatti, Roberta

Using a new data set comprised of publicly available information, this paper provides cross-country evidence on domestic government spending for human capital in recent years. Creating a measure of social spending that covers the three sectors of health, education, and social protection has proven to be a challenging task. Only for health spending is there high data coverage over time and across countries. Education and, especially, social protection display large gaps. Increases in social sector spending have generally been slow and unsteady. Although education spending in low-income countries has seen a stable and steady increase, spending on health has been remarkably flat. Human capital outcomes are only weakly correlated with spending in the three sectors. Finally, this paper discusses future research required to provide guidance on how much and what type of investment is needed to achieve high levels of human capital.
Overconfident: How Economic and Health Fault Lines Left the Middle East and North Africa Ill-Prepared to Face COVID-19

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-10-07) Gatti, Roberta ; Lederman, Daniel ; Fan, Rachel Yuting ; Hatefi, Arian ; Nguyen, Ha ; Sautmann, Anja ; Sax, Joseph Martin ; Wood, Christina A.

This report examines the region’s economic prospects in 2021, forecasting that the recovery will be both tenuous and uneven as per capita GDP level stays below pre-pandemic levels. COVID-19 was a stress-test for the region’s public health systems, which were already overwhelmed even before the pandemic. Indeed, a decade of lackluster economic reforms left a legacy of large public sectors and high public debt that effectively crowded out investments in social services such as public health. This edition points out that the region’s health systems were not only ill-prepared for the pandemic, but suffered from over-confidence, as authorities painted an overly optimistic picture in self-assessments of health system preparedness. Going forward, governments must improve data transparency for public health and undertake reforms to remedy historical underinvestment in public health systems.
The Quality of Health and Education Systems Across Africa: Evidence from a Decade of Service Delivery Indicators Surveys

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-11-18) Gatti, Roberta ; Andrews, Kathryn ; Avitabile, Ciro ; Conner, Ruben ; Sharma, Jigyasa ; Yi Chang, Andres

Have teachers mastered the subject matter they are teaching? Can doctors accurately diagnose and treat critical health conditions? Are schools and health facilities sufficiently stocked with needed equipment and supplies? Are they sufficiently supported and staffed to optimize learning and health care outcomes? For the past decade, the World Bank’s Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) surveys have collected nationally representative data in countries across Africa to answer these questions. The surveys aim to measure the quality of services where they meet citizens: in schools and health facilities. The Quality of Health and Education Systems Across Africa: Evidence from a Decade of Service Delivery Indicators Surveys identifies areas of achievement and constraint in service delivery, shedding light on how service delivery may foster or stunt human capital accumulation. SDI surveys show that schools and health clinics across Africa are still falling short in some critical areas. The delivery of primary care services is very heterogenous between and within countries. Many health facilities lack the basic necessities to provide proper care, such as essential medicines, basic diagnostic equipment, and adequate water and sanitation. Moreover, health care providers’ ability to diagnose and treat common health conditions correctly is low and distributed unevenly. Health personnel’s absence from health facilities remains a concern across the surveyed countries. Learning is low, and, not unlike health care, levels of student learning vary significantly across countries: less than half of grade 4 students can recite a simple sentence or perform basic mathematical operations. This deficient learning is correlated with teachers’ low levels of content knowledge and sub-par pedagogy skills. Some schools are also missing crucial inputs, such as blackboards or private and gendered toilets, and struggle with high pupil-teacher ratios. Despite these challenges, success stories in both sectors illustrate the quality of service delivery that could be achieved and showcase the dedication of teachers and medical staff across Africa. By studying data from thousands of facilities, considering the local context, and drawing insights from the literature, this book offers important insights for how countries can strengthen health and education systems and build back better in the wake of the massive disruptions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Five Ways that COVID-19 Diagnostics Can Save Lives: Prioritizing Uses of Tests to Maximize Cost-Effectiveness

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-02-23) Reed, Tristan ; Waites, William ; Manheim, David ; de Walque, Damien ; Vallini, Chiara ; Gatti, Roberta ; Hallett, Timothy B.

Supplies of diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 (coronavirus), are still limited in many countries, and there is uncertainty about how to allocate the scarce supply across alternative types of testing (use cases). This Research & Policy Brief quantifies the cost-effectiveness of five alternative diagnostic use cases in terms of tests required per death averted. Across use cases, a single death can be averted by administering 940 to 8,838 tests, implying a large and positive return on investment in all use cases-even assuming a very low value for loss of life. That is, all five use cases pay for themselves many times over. When prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 is high, the most cost-effective uses of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics seem to be clinical triage of patients, at-risk worker screening, and population surveillance. Test-trace-isolate programs and border screening are alsoworthwhile, although they are more resource intensive per death averted if done comprehensively. These latter two interventions become relativelymore cost effective when prevalence is low, and can stop the virus from entering a community completely. While governments should seekwidespread deployment of tests in all five use cases, prioritizing them in this way is likely to maximize the cost-effectiveness of their use. As morecontagious strains emerge, each use case will become more valuable than ever.
What Can the Service Delivery Indicator Surveys Tell Us about COVID-19 Preparedness?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) Sharma, Jigyasa ; Andrews, Kathryn ; Conner, Ruben ; Gatti, Roberta

To aid national and international efforts to support countries in enhancing their pandemic preparedness in the face of COVID-19, this paper draws from the World Bank's Service Delivery Indicator surveys to highlight key aspects of health service preparedness in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. The results of this analysis paint a highly variable picture. At least 10 percent of lower-level facilities in all three countries have inpatient care capacity, suggesting that these lower-level facilities could help absorb surges in patient flow. Less than half of the facilities in the three countries have a fixed or mobile phone and less than a third have internet access, suggesting a likely challenge in communication and timely sharing of essential information. Concerningly, less than half of the facilities have appropriate handwashing facilities for patients, with even lower rates in rural areas. Between 80 and 95 percent of the facilities have a thermometer to diagnose fever, but availability of a thermometer, stethoscope, and blood pressure cuff together is variable (ranging from almost 90 percent of the facilities in Tanzania to less than 65 percent in Sierra Leone). The paper concludes by highlighting key innovations for future surveys to improve measurement of pandemic preparedness.