Person:
Gatti, Roberta
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
LABOR ECONOMICS,
POLITICAL ECONOMY,
SOCIAL INCLUSION,
ECONOMIC GROWTH
Degrees
External Links
Departments
MENA Chief Economist Office
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
October 10, 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.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 32
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Publication
Reality Check: Forecasting Growth in the Middle East and North Africa in Times of Uncertainty
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-04-11)The Middle East and North Africa economies face an uncertain recovery. The war in Ukraine presents significant challenges to the global economy and the MENA region. Inflationary pressures brought about by the pandemic are likely to be further exacerbated by the conflict. The potential for rising food prices is even higher, which is likely to hurt the wallets of the poor and vulnerable in the region. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cast a shadow. As the latest variant sweeps over the region, countries grapple with a host of problems depending on initial conditions and policy priorities. The region, like the rest of the world, is not out of the woods yet. Vaccinations remain the effective path out of the pandemic, leading to lower hospitalizations and death rates. Testing helps curb the spread. During times of uncertainty, it is important to not be overconfident about the region’s growth prospects. Growth forecasts serve as a significant signpost for policymakers to chart a path forward. Over the last decade, growth forecasts in the MENA region have often been inaccurate and overly optimistic, which can lead to economic contractions down the road due to ebullient borrowing. There is considerable room for the region to improve its forecasts that are largely hindered by opaque data systems, growth volatility and conflict. The MENA region lags considerably in the timely production of credible statistics. A key finding of the report is that the best way to improve forecasters is to provide forecasters with as much good quality information as possible. -
Publication
Five Ways that COVID-19 Diagnostics Can Save Lives: Prioritizing Uses of Tests to Maximize Cost-Effectiveness
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-02-23)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. -
Publication
A Primer on Human Capital
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01)This note summarizes some of the key contributions in the macro- and micro- economic literature on the pathways linking human capital and income growth. Rather than completeness, the objective of this work is to distill some of the most relevant threads in the evolution of these literatures using a human capital lens, with a view to provide a useful yet parsimonious conceptual framework and an update on empirical results. The note first describes the human capital model (section 1). It then outlines the main theoretical elements of growth theory and presents empirical results from the cross-country regressions and development accounting literature to gauge to what extent human capital affects growth at the aggregate level (sections 2, 3 and 4). The note then reviews the micro empirical literature estimating labor income returns of human capital investments (sections 5 and 6). The conclusion draws comparisons between the two empirical approaches and provides a brief critical assessment on how to interpret the empirical results. Investing in human capital is a promising strategy to attain stable and positive growth. The magnitude of the effects is country-specific and varies depending on the population of interest, the policy under consideration, and the human capital component considered. -
Publication
A Socioeconomic Disaggregation of the World Bank Human Capital Index
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09)This paper documents inequality in health and education outcomes by constructing an index of human capital disaggregated by quintiles of socioeconomic status (SES) for a sample 51 mostly low- and middle-income countries. The index measures the expected future human capital of children born today, following the methodology of the World Bank Human Capital Index that was launched in October 2018. Within-country disparities in human capital outcomes across SES quintiles are large, accounting for roughly one-third of the total variation. On average, human capital outcomes increase with income at roughly the same rate across socio-economic groups within countries as they do across countries. -
Publication
Why Should We Care About Child Labor? The Education, Labor Market, and Health Consequences of Child Labor
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-01)Although there is extensive literature on the determinants of child labor and many initiatives aimed at combating it, there is limited evidence on the consequences of child labor on socioeconomic outcomes such as education, wages, and health. The authors evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy. Five years subsequent to the child labor experience, they find significant negative effects on school participation and educational attainment, but also find substantially higher earnings for those (young) adults who worked as children. The authors find no significant effects on health. Over a longer horizon, they estimate that from age 30 onward the forgone earnings attributable to lost schooling exceed any earnings gain associated with child labor and that the net present discounted value of child labor is positive for discount rates of 11.5 percent or higher. The authors show that child labor is prevalent among households likely to have higher borrowing costs, that are farther from schools, and whose adult members experienced negative returns to their own education. This evidence suggests that reducing child labor will require facilitating access to credit and will also require households to be forward looking. -
Publication
The Realities of Primary Care: Variation in Quality of Care Across Nine Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the centrality of primary care in protecting people’s health and well-being during and beyond crises. It has also provided an opportunity to strengthen and redesign primary care so that it will better serve its purpose. However, to-date there is limited evidence on the quality of service delivery in primary care. Service Delivery Indicators surveys have attempted to fill this gap. Using Service Delivery Indicators surveys of 7,810 health facilities and 66,151 health care providers in nine Sub-Saharan African countries, this paper investigates the quality of care across five domains to understand a citizen’s experience of primary care in his/her country. The results indicate substantial heterogeneity in the quality of primary care service delivery between and within countries. The availability of basic equipment, infrastructure, and essential medicines varies—public facilities, facilities in rural areas, and non-hospitals are more lacking compared with private facilities, urban facilities, and hospitals. In terms of patient care, health care providers’ ability to correctly diagnose and treat common health conditions is low and variably distributed. COVID-19 has catalyzed a long overdue health system redesign effort, and the Service Delivery Indicators surveys offer an opportunity to examine carefully the quality of service delivery, with an eye toward health system reform. -
Publication
A New State of Mind: Greater Transparency and Accountability in the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022-10-05)The MENA region is facing important vulnerabilities, which the current crises—first the pandemic, then the war in Ukraine—have exacerbated. Prices of food and energy are higher, hurting the most vulnerable, and rising interest rates from the global tightening of monetary policy are making debt service more burdensome. Part I explores some of the resulting vulnerabilities for MENA. MENA countries are facing diverging paths for future growth. Oil Exporters have seen windfall increases in state revenues from the rise in hydrocarbon prices, while oil importers face heightened stress and risk—from higher import bills, especially for food and energy, and the depreciation of local currencies in some countries. Part II of this report argues that poor governance, and, in particular, the lack of government transparency and accountability, is at the root of the region’s development failings—including low growth, exclusion of the most disadvantaged and women, and overuse of such precious natural resources as land and water. -
Publication
Labor Market Transitions in Egypt Post-Arab Spring
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-07)This paper examines the Arab Republic of Egypt’s labor market transition dynamics post–Arab Spring based on the two most recent rounds of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey conducted in 2012 and 2018. In addition to providing disaggregated-level analysis by examining labor market transitions by gender, education, and age groups, the paper provides a cross-country, cross-regional perspective by comparing Egypt’s labor market transitions with Mexico’s, relying on data from the Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo. To match the span of Mexico’s transitions (which are measured over a one-year period) and Egypt’s (which are measured over six years), the analysis uses Monte Carlo simulations of repeated discrete-time Markov chains. Based on these results, the Egyptian labor market appears to be highly rigid compared to the Mexican labor market, which instead shows a large degree of dynamism regardless of individual initial labor market states at baseline. Auxiliary regression analyses focusing on transitions to and from the dominant absorbing labor market states in Egypt —public sector employment for both genders, nonparticipation for women, and the informal sector for men—show that having a post-secondary education is associated with a lower probability of remaining out of the labor force for women who were already out of the labor force at baseline, while being married at baseline is found to be a significant predictor for women to stay out of the labor force if they were already so. Among men, the better educated are found to be more likely to secure formal employment, be it in the public or private sector, and are more likely to keep their public formal jobs once they secure them. -
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Why Should We Care about Child Labor? The Education, Labor Market, and Health Consequences of Child Labor
( 2009-10)Despite the extensive literature on the determinants of child labor, the evidence on the consequences of child labor on outcomes such as education, labor, and health is limited. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation among children in school on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy. Five years subsequent to the child labor experience we find significant negative impacts on education, and also find a higher probability of wage work for those young adults who worked as children while attending school. We find few significant effects on health. -
Publication
Altered Destinies: The Long-Term Effects of Rising Prices and Food Insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2023-04-06)Growth is forecasted to slow down for the Middle East and North Africa region. The war in Ukraine in 2022 exacerbated inflationary pressures as the world recovered from the COVID 19 pandemic induced recession. The response by central banks to raise rates to curb inflation is slowing economic activity, while rising food prices are making it difficult for families to put meals on the table. Inflation, when it stems from food prices, hits the poor harder than the rich, thus compounding food insecurity in MENA that had been rising over decades. The immediate effects of food insecurity can be a devastating loss of life, but even temporary increases in food prices can cause long-term irreversible damages, especially to children. The rise in food prices due to the war in Ukraine may have altered the destinies of hundreds of thousands of children in the region, setting them on paths to limited prosperity. Food insecurity imposes challenges to a region where the state of child nutrition and health were inadequate before the shocks from the COVID-19 pandemic. The report discusses policy options and highlights the need for data to guide effective decision making.