Person: Grosh, Margaret
Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice
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Social safety nets, Poverty analysis, Labor markets, Social protection
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Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Margaret Grosh is the Senior Advisor for the World Bank’s Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice. She has written, lectured, and advised extensively on social protection programs, especially on targeting and cash transfer programs, globally and for Latin America. She has extensive experience with social protection both for responding to a crisis and for improving equality of opportunity. Earlier, she served as Lead Economist in the Latin American and Caribbean Region’s Human Development Department, led the team for Social Assistance in the World Bank’s Global Social Protection Department and, before that, the Living Standard Measurement Study in the Research Department. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.
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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Publication Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance: A New Look at Old Dilemmas(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-31) Grosh, Margaret; Wai-Poi, Matthew; Tesliuc, EmilTargeting is a commonly used, but much debated, policy within global social assistance practice. This book examines the well- known dilemmas in light of the growing body of experience, new implementation capacities, and the potential to bring new data and data science to bear. Chapter 1 presents a series of essays on the factors that shape choices around why or whether or how narrowly/broadly to target different parts of social assistance. Chapter 2 updates the global empirics around the outcomes and costs of focusing benefits on the poor or vulnerable. Chapter 3 illustrates the options and choices that must be made in moving from an abstract vision of focusing resources on the poor or vulnerable to more specific concepts and implementable definitions and procedures, and how the many choices should be informed by values, empirics and context. Chapter 4 provides a brief treatment of delivery systems and processes showing their importance to distributional outcomes and suggesting the many facets with room for improvement. Chapter 5 discusses the choice between targeting methods, how differences in purposes and contexts shape those. Chapter 6 summarizes and comprehensively updates the know-how with respect to the data and inference used by the different household-specific targeting methods. Chapter 7 contains a primer on measurement issues, going much deeper than usual and explaining how better measurement can lead to clearer understanding of targeting issues. Chapter 8 explores machine learning algorithms for household-specific mechanisms for eligibility determination.Publication Exploring Universal Basic Income: A Guide to Navigating Concepts, Evidence, and Practices(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020) Gentilini, Ugo; Grosh, Margaret; Rigolini, Jamele; Yemtsov, Ruslan; Gentilini, Ugo; Grosh, Margaret; Rigolini, Jamele; Yemtsov, Ruslan; Bastagli, Francesca; Lustig, Nora; Monsalve Montiel, Emma; Quan, Siyu; Ter-Minassian, Teresa; De Wispelaere, Jurgen; Lowe, Christina; George, TinaUniversal basic income (UBI) is emerging as one of the most hotly debated issues in development and social protection policy. But what are the features of UBI? What is it meant to achieve? How do we know, and what don’t we know, about its performance? What does it take to implement it in practice? Drawing from global evidence, literature, and survey data, this volume provides a framework to elucidate issues and trade-offs in UBI with a view to help inform choices around its appropriateness and feasibility in different contexts. Specifically, the book examines how UBI differs from or complements other social assistance programs in terms of objectives, coverage, incidence, adequacy, incentives, effects on poverty and inequality, financing, political economy, and implementation. It also reviews past and current country experiences, surveys the full range of existing policy proposals, provides original results from micro–tax benefit simulations, and sets out a range of considerations around the analytics and practice of UBI.Publication Protecting All: Risk Sharing for a Diverse and Diversifying World of Work(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-09-09) Packard, Truman; Gentilini, Ugo; Grosh, Margaret; O’Keefe, Philip; Palacios, Robert; Robalino, David; Santos, IndhiraThis white paper focusses on the policy interventions made to help people manage risk, uncertainty and the losses from events whose impacts are channeled primarily through the labor market. The objectives of the white paper are: to scrutinize the relevance and effects of prevailing risk-sharing policies in low- and middle-income countries; take account of how global drivers of disruption shape and diversify how people work; in light of this diversity, propose alternative risk-sharing policies, or ways to augment and improve current policies to be more relevant and responsive to peoples’ needs; and map a reasonable transition path from the current to an alternative policy approach that substantially extends protection to a greater portion of working people and their families. This white paper is a contribution to the broader, global discussion of the changing nature of work and how policy can shape its implications for the wellbeing of people. We use the term risk-sharing policies broadly in reference to the set of institutions, regulations and interventions that societies put in place to help households manage shocks to their livelihoods. These policies include formal rules and structures that regulate market interactions (worker protections and other labor market institutions) that help people pool risks (social assistance and social insurance), to save and insure affordably and effectively (mandatory and incentivized individual savings and other financial instruments) and to recover from losses in the wake of livelihood shocks (“active” reemployment measures). Effective risk-sharing policies are foundational to building equity, resilience and opportunity, the strategic objectives of the World Bank’s Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice. Given failures of factor markets and the market for risk in particular the rationale for policy intervention to augment the options that people have to manage shocks to their livelihoods is well-understood and accepted. By helping to prevent vulnerable people from falling into poverty -and people in the poorest households from falling deeper into poverty- effective risk-sharing interventions dramatically reduce poverty. Households and communities with access to effective risk-sharing instruments can better maintain and continue to invest in these vital assets, first and foremost, their human capital, and in doing so can reduce the likelihood that poverty and vulnerability will be transmitted from one generation to the next. Risk-sharing policies foster enterprise and development by ensuring that people can take appropriate risks required to grasp opportunities and secure their stake in a growing economy.