Person:
Lokshin, Michael M.

Development Data Group

Fields of Specialization

Social safety nets, Child health, Poverty mapping, Inequality, Poverty analysis, Labor

Departments

Development Data Group

Last updated April 11, 2023

Biography

Michael Lokshin is a Lead Economist and Manager in the Development Data Group of the World Bank. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999 after which he joined the research group at the World Bank as a Young Economist (YE program). His research focuses on the areas of poverty and inequality measurement, labor economics, and applied econometrics. More recently he has been involved in the Bank's efforts to develop the methodology of evaluating the effect of crisis and public policies on households in developing countries. He also leads the group of researchers in development of the Software Platform for Automated Economic Analysis (ADePT).

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 64

A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality--Theory and Practice : Streamlined Analysis with ADePT Software

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013-05-10) Foster, James ; Seth, Suman ; Lokshin, Michael ; Sajaia, Zurab

A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality: Theory and Practice is an introduction to the theory and practice of measuring poverty and inequality, as well as a user's guide for analyzing income or consumption distribution for any standard household dataset using the World Bank's ADePT software. The approach taken here considers income standards as building blocks for basic measurement, then uses them to construct inequality and poverty measures. This unified approach provides advantages in interpreting and contrasting the measures and in understanding the way measures vary over time and space. Several recent initiatives have lowered the cost of accessing household datasets. The ADePT software enables users to analyze microdata from household surveys and other sources and generate print-ready, standardized tables and charts. It can also be used to simulate the impact of economic shocks, cash transfers and other policy instruments on poverty, and inequality. The software automates analysis, helps minimize human errors, and encourages development of new economic analysis methods. Of interest to teachers and students as well as to policy practitioners, A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality will empower researchers to plumb greater depths in searching for regularity in larger and larger datasets. This book should help to enrich discussion and analysis relating to the World Bank's recent effort toward defining new targets and indicators for promoting work on eradicating poverty and enhancing shared prosperity.
Rich and Powerful? Subjective Power and Welfare in Russia

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2002-06-30) Lokshin, Michael ; Ravallion, Martin

Does "empowerment" come hand-in-hand with higher economic welfare? In theory, higher income is likely to raise both power and welfare, but heterogeneity in other characteristics and household formation can either strengthen or weaken the relationship. Survey data on Russian adults indicate that higher individual and household incomes raise both self-rated power and welfare. The individual income effect is primarily direct, rather than through higher household income. There are diminishing returns to income, though income inequality emerges as only a minor factor reducing either aggregate power or welfare. At given income, the identified covariates have strikingly similar effects on power and welfare. There are some notable differences between men and women in perceived power.
Robustness of Subjective Welfare Analysis in a Poor Developing Country: Madagascar 2001

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-01) Lokshin, Michael ; Umapathi, Nithin ; Paternostro, Stefano

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.
Household Schooling Decisions in Rural Pakistan

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-02) Sawada, Yasayuki ; Lokshin, Michael

Human capital investments in Pakistan are performing poorly; school enrollment is low, the high school dropout rate is high, and there is a definite gender gap in education. The authors conducted field surveys in 25 Pakistani villages and integrated their field observations, economic theory, and econometric analysis to investigate the sequential nature of education decisions--because current outcomes depend not only on current decisions but also on past decisions. Their full-information maximum likelihood estimate of the sequential schooling decision model reveals important dynamics affecting the gender gap in education, the effects of transitory income and wealth, and intrahousehold resource allocation patterns. They find, among other things, that in rural Pakistan: 1) There is a high educational retention rate, conditional on school entry, and that male and female schooling progression rates become comparable at higher levels of education. 2) A household's human and physical assets and changes in its income significantly affect children's education patterns. Birth order affects siblings' competition for resources. 3) Serious supply-side constraints on village girls' primary education suggest the importance of supply-side policy interventions in Pakistan's rural primary education--for example, providing more girls' primary schools close to villages and employing more female teachers.
Gainers and Losers from Trade Reform in Morocco

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-08) Ravallion, Martin ; Lokshin, Michael

The authors use Morocco's national survey of living standards to measure the short-term welfare impacts of prior estimates of the price changes attributed to various trade policy reforms for cereals-the country's main food staple. They find small impacts on mean consumption and inequality in the aggregate. There are both gainers and losers and (contrary to past claims) the rural poor are worse off on average after trade policy reforms. The authors decompose the aggregate impact on inequality into a "vertical" component (between people at different pre-reform welfare levels) and a "horizontal" component (between people at the same pre-reform welfare level). There is a large horizontal component which dominates the vertical impact of full de-protection. The diverse impacts reflect a degree of observable heterogeneity in consumption behavior and income sources, with implications for social protection policies.
Has Rural Infrastructure Rehabilitation in Georgia Helped the Poor?

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-08-31) Lokshin, Michael ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

This article proposes a research strategy to deal with the scarcity of data on beneficiaries for conducting impact assessments of community-level projects. Community-level panel data from a regular household survey augmented with a special community module are used to measure the impact of projects. Propensity score-matched difference in-difference comparisons are used to control for time-invariant unobservable factors. This methodology takes into consideration the purposeful placement of projects and their interactions at the community level. This empirical approach is applied to infrastructure rehabilitation projects, for schools, roads, and water supply systems, in rural Georgia between 1998 and 2001. The analysis produces plausible results regarding the size of welfare gains from a particular project at the village level and allows for differentiation of benefits between the poor and the non-poor. The findings of this study can contribute to evaluations of the impact of infrastructure interventions on poverty by bringing new empirical evidence to bear on the welfare and equity implications.
Household Strategies for Coping with Poverty and Social Exclusion in Post-Crisis Russia

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-02) Lokshin, Michael M. ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

What strategies have Russian households used, to cope with economic hardship in the wake of recent financial crisis? Which coping strategies have been most effective in reducing poverty for different groups of households? And how have people been able to adapt to the dramatic drop in formal cash incomes? The authors look at these questions using subjective evaluations of coping strategies used by household survey respondents to mitigate the effects of the Russian financial crisis on their welfare. The data come from two rounds (1996 and 1998) of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. The results of their analysis show that a household's choice of survival strategy, strongly depends on its human capital: the higher its level of human capital, the more likely it is to choose an active strategy (such as finding a supplementary job, or increasing home production). Households with low levels of human capital, those headed by pensioners, and those whose members have low levels of education, are more likely to suffer social exclusion. To prevent poverty from becoming entrenched, the trend toward marginalization, and impoverishment of these groups of households, needs to be monitored, and targeted policy interventions need to be undertaken to reverse the trend.
Evaluating the Impact of Infrastructure Rehabilitation Projects on Household Welfare in Rural Georgia

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-10) Lokshin, Michael ; Yemtsov, Ruslan

The authors evaluate the effect of various community level infrastructure rehabilitation projects undertaken in rural Georgia on household well-being. Their analysis is based on combining household and community level survey data. The authors' empirical approach uses the panel structure of the data to control for time-invariant un-observables at the community level by applying propensity-score-matched double difference comparison. The results indicate that improvements in school and road infrastructure produce nontrivial welfare gains for the poor at the village and country levels. The impact of water rehabilitation projects is ambiguous. School rehabilitation projects produce the largest gains for the poor. The methodological lesson from this analysis is that ad hoc community surveys matched with ongoing nationally representative surveys can provide a feasible and low cost impact evaluation tool.
Gender and Poverty : A Life Cycle Approach to the Analysis of the Differences in Gender Outcomes

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-10) Lokshin, Michael ; Mroz, Thomas A.

The authors study complex interactions between gender and poverty in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The goal of their analysis is to uncover how a spectrum of gender differentials at different parts of the life cycle varies across income groups. Using the data from the 2001 Bosnia and Herzegovina Living Standards Measurement Study, the authors find strong gender-poverty interaction in the patterns of labor force participation, gender gap in earnings, individuals' school finances, and school attendance. The main source of gender inequality seems to come from differences in investments in girls' and boys' educations that increase with declines in income levels. Short-term income shocks could lead to long-term increases in gender inequality in households with school age children, unless there is ready access to credit markets. The authors also find that the magnitude of the impact of economic development on gender differences in Bosnia will depend on where the growth is concentrated. If the poor capture at least some benefits of economic growth, the gender differences in household investment in human capital of their children will decline. If, on the other hand, growth is concentrated among the richest, then important gender disparities could remain pervasive.
On the Utility Consistency of Poverty Lines

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-10) Ravallion, Martin ; Lokshin, Michael

Although poverty lines are widely used as deflators for inter-group welfare comparisons, their internal consistency is rarely given close scrutiny. A priori considerations suggest that commonly used methods cannot be relied on to yield poverty lines that are consistent in terms of utility, or for capabilities more generally. The theory of revealed preference offers testable implications of utility consistency for "poverty baskets" under homogeneous preferences. A case study of Russia's official poverty lines reveals numerous violations of revealed preference criteria-violations that are not solely attributable to heterogeneity in preferences associated with climatic differences.