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Skoufias, Emmanuel

Poverty Reduction and Equity Department, World Bank
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labor and demographic economics; economics of nutrition; agricultural economics; applied econometrics; program evaluation
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Poverty Reduction and Equity Department, World Bank
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Last updated: September 5, 2024
Biography
Emmanuel Skoufias is a Lead Economist at the World Bank working on poverty and distributional issues.  He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota and prior to joining the Bank he was faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder and Pennsylvania State University, a Senior Researcher at the Inter-American Development Bank, and a Senior Research Fellowat the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) where he led the impact evaluation of the PROGRESA program of Mexico. Emmanuel has published papers in a variety of academic journals on the targeting of social programs, the impacts of transfer programs, child health and nutrition, the role of public transfers in redistributing income, land tenancy, regional welfare disparities, risk sharing, vulnerability, and the impacts of climate change on different dimensions of welfare. Currently he is co-leading the SecureNutrition Knowledge Platform that focuses on the linkages between agriculture, food security, and nutrition.
Citations 91 Scopus

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 59
  • Publication
    Sustaining Poverty Gains: A Vulnerability Map to Guide the Expansion of Social Registries
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-05) Barriga-Cabanillas, Oscar; Bossuroy, Thomas; Corral Rodas, Paul Andres; Rodríguez-Castelán, Carlos; Skoufias, Emmanuel
    Poverty maps are a useful tool for targeting social programs on areas with high concentrations of poverty. However, a static focus on poverty ignores its temporal dimension. Thus, current nonpoor households still face substantial welfare volatility and are at risk of becoming poor in the face of shocks. This paper combines the methods of poverty mapping and vulnerability estimation to create highly disaggregated vulnerability maps. The maps include predictions of the share of chronically poor households (poverty-induced vulnerability)—the focus of traditional poverty maps—and the share of households showing a significant probability of falling into poverty (risk-induced vulnerability). As an application of the method, the paper estimates a vulnerability map for Senegal that provides quotas for the expansion of the social registry. Accounting for the poor and the population at risk of poverty implies, in practice, the expansion of coverage into urban and peri-urban areas that tend to experience lower poverty rates. The inclusion of nonpoor households also serves as a first step toward supporting a dynamic social registry.
  • Publication
    The Welfare Cost of Drought in Sub-Saharan Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-01-29) Gascoigne, Jon; Baquie, Sandra; Vinha, Katja Pauliina; Calcutt, Evie Isabel Neall; Kshirsagar, Varun Sridhar; Meenan, Conor; Hill, Ruth; Skoufias, Emmanuel
    This paper quantifies the impact of drought on household consumption for five main agroecological zones in Africa, developing vulnerability (or damage) functions of the relationship between rainfall deficits and poverty. Damage functions are a key element in models that quantify the risk of extreme weather and the impacts of climate change. Although these functions are commonly estimated for storm or flood damages to buildings, they are less often available for income losses from droughts. The paper takes a regional approach to the analysis, developing standardized hazard definitions and methods for matching hazard and household data, allowing survey data from close to 100,000 households to be used in the analysis. The damage functions are used to quantify the impact of historical weather conditions on poverty for eight countries, highlighting the risk to poverty outcomes that weather variability causes. National poverty rates are 1–12 percent higher, depending on the country, under the worst weather conditions relative to the best conditions observed in the past 13 years. This amounts to an increase in the total poverty gap that ranges from US$4 million to US$2.4 billion (2011 purchasing power parity).
  • Publication
    Quantifying Vulnerability to Poverty in the Drought-Prone Lowlands of Ethiopia
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-02) Vinha, Katja; Skoufias, Emmanuel; Beyene, Berhe Mekonnen
    A forward-looking measure of “vulnerability to poverty” is estimated and a concerted effort is made to understand the sources of vulnerability in the drought-prone lowlands of Ethiopia. Using the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey and the Welfare Monitoring Survey of 2016, the analysis reveals that vulnerability is remarkably higher in the drought-prone lowlands than in the other ecological zones, although differences in poverty rates are modest; the vulnerability rate is more than two times larger than the poverty rate in the lowlands, while the ratio is only 1.6 for the whole country. The analysis also reveals important distinctions in the sources of vulnerability. In the drought-prone lowlands: (i) vulnerability due to aggregate shocks such as droughts is lower than vulnerability due to idiosyncratic shocks in absolute terms, but its relative importance is higher compared with other ecological zones; and (ii) poverty-induced vulnerability is relatively more important than risk-induced vulnerability in contrast to other regions where risk-induced vulnerability is higher than poverty-induced vulnerability. These findings attest to the unique nature of the drought-prone lowlands compared with the other agroecological zones and points in favor of policies and programs tailored specifically to the areas.
  • Publication
    World Bank Equity Policy Lab Vulnerability Tool to Measure Poverty Risk
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Gao, Jia; Vinha, Katja; Skoufias, Emmanuel
    Vulnerability to poverty refers to the likelihood that a household or an individual may fall below the poverty line in the event of a shock. Understanding vulnerability helps design policies to protect households and promote resilience. The World Bank's Equity Policy Lab (EPL) and the Global Solutions Group on the Welfare Implications of Climate Change, Fragility and Conflict Risks have developed a new tool to analyze the prevalence, causes, and sources of household vulnerability to poverty across different regions within a country. We use the example of Ethiopia to illustrate how countries can use the Vulnerability Tool to analyze vulnerability and adopt policies and programs to address it.
  • Publication
    Child Stature, Maternal Education, and Early Childhood Development
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09) Vinha, Katja; Skoufias, Emmanuel
    This paper uses Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys data from the Republic of Congo and São Tomé and Príncipe to study the relationships between child stature, mother's years of education, and indicators of early childhood development. The relationships are contrasted between two empirical approaches: the conventional approach whereby control variables are selected in an ad-hoc manner and the double machine-learning approach that employs data-driven methods to select controls from a much wider set of variables. Overall, the findings based on the preferable double machine-learning approach differ across the two countries depending on the measures of early childhood development and child stature (height-for-age Z-score and stunting) used in the analysis. Double machine-learning estimates for the Republic of Congo suggest that height-for-age Z-score and stunting have a direct causal effect on early childhood development. In contrast, for São Tomé and Príncipe, no relationship is found. Thus, country-specific policy advice based on the relationships observed from data in other countries may be quite risky, if not misleading. Double machine-learning provides a practical and feasible approach to reducing threats to internal validity to derive robust inferences based on observational data for evidence-based policy advice.
  • Publication
    Adaptive Safety Nets for Rural Africa: Drought-Sensitive Targeting with Sparse Data
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) Baez, Javier E.; Kshirsagar, Varun; Skoufias, Emmanuel
    This paper combines remote-sensed data and individual child, mother, and household-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 5 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to design a prototype drought-contingent targeting framework for use in scarce-data contexts. To accomplish this, the paper: (i) develops simple and easy-to-communicate measures of drought shocks; (ii) shows that droughts have a large impact on child stunting in these five countries, comparable, in size, to the effects of mother’s illiteracy or a fall to a lower wealth quintile; and (iii) shows that, in this context, decision trees and regressions predict stunting as accurately as complex machine learning methods that are not interpretable.2 Taken together, the analysis lends support to the idea that a data-driven approach may contribute to the design of a transparent and easy-to-use drought-contingent targeting framework
  • Publication
    Realizing Demographic Dividends in the Republic of Congo
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Zine Eddine El Idrissi, Moulay Driss; Skoufias, Emmanuel
    Between 2005 and 2015 the population living in poverty decreased substantially due to increased government revenues from high oil prices and the expansionary spending that accompanied these revenues. However, despite the recent substantial reduction in poverty, results commensurate with its level of GDP and natural resource endowment have yet to be achieved. Furthermore, during the years of strong economic growth, the economy created jobs, but these were offset by the population growth. The analysis in this report lays the groundwork for more effective actions accelerating the demographic transition in Congo and facilitating the realization of the potential demographic dividend. With the right set of policies in place, the change in the structure of the population during the demographic transition offers an opportunity to capitalize on the “demographic dividend” that can help generate additional growth in the future.
  • Publication
    Adaptive Safety Nets for Rural Africa: Drought-Sensitive Targeting with Sparse Data
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12) Baez, Javier E.; Kshirsagar, Varun; Skoufias, Emmanuel
    This paper combines remote-sensed data and individual child-, mother-, and household-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) to design a prototype drought-contingent targeting framework that may be used in scarce-data contexts. To accomplish this, the paper: (i) develops simple and easy-to-communicate measures of drought shocks; (ii) shows that droughts have a large impact on child stunting in these five countries -- comparable, in size, to the effects of mother's illiteracy and a fall to a lower wealth quintile; and (iii) shows that, in this context, decision trees and logistic regressions predict stunting as accurately (out-of-sample) as machine learning methods that are not interpretable. Taken together, the analysis lends support to the idea that a data-driven approach may contribute to the design of policies that mitigate the impact of climate change on the world's most vulnerable populations.
  • Publication
    Can We Rely on VIIRS Nightlights to Estimate the Short-Term Impacts of Natural Disasters? Evidence from Five Southeast Asian Countries
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10) Strobl, Eric; Skoufias, Emmanuel; Tveit, Thomas
    Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) nightlights are used to model damage caused by earthquakes, floods, and typhoons in five Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam). The data are used to examine the extent to which for each type of hazard there is a difference in nightlight intensity between affected and nonaffected cells based on (i) case studies of specific disasters, and (ii) fixed effect regression models akin to the double difference method to determine any effect that the different natural hazards might have had on the nightlight value. The results show little to no significance regardless of the methodology used, most likely due to noise in the nightlight data and the fact that the tropics have only a few days per month with no cloud cover.
  • Publication
    All Hands on Deck: Reducing Stunting through Multisectoral Efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank and Agence française de développement, 2019-07-03) Vinha, Katja; Skoufias, Emmanuel; Sato, Ryoko
    In Sub-Saharan Africa, the scale of undernutrition is staggering; 58 million children under the age of five are too short for their age (stunted), and 14 million weigh too little for their height (wasted). Poor diets in terms of diversity, quality, and quantity, combined with illness and poor water and sanitation facilities, are linked with deficiencies of micronutrients—such as iodine, vitamin A, and iron—associated with growth, development, and immune function. In the short term, inequities in access to the determinants of nutrition increase the incidence of undernutrition and diarrheal disease. In the long term, the chronic undernutrition of children has important consequences for individuals and societies: a high risk of stunting, impaired cognitive development, lower school attendance rates, reduced human capital attainment, and a higher risk of chronic disease and health problems in adulthood. Inequities in access to services early in life contribute to the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Recent World Bank estimates suggest that the income penalty a country incurs for not having eliminated stunting when today’s workers were children is about 9–10 percent of gross domestic product per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa. Much of the effort to date has focused on the costing, financing, and impact of nutrition-specific interventions delivered mainly through the health sector to reach the global nutrition targets for stunting, anemia, and breastfeeding, and interventions for treating wasting. However, the determinants of undernutrition are multisectoral, and the solution to undernutrition requires multisectoral approaches. An acceleration of the progress to reduce stunting in Sub-Saharan Africa requires engaging additional sectors—such as agriculture; education; social protection; and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH)—to improve nutrition. This book lays the groundwork for more effective multisectoral action by analyzing and generating empirical evidence to inform the joint targeting of nutrition-sensitive interventions. Using information from 33 recent Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), measures are constructed to capture a child’s access to food security, care practices, health care, and WASH, to identify gaps in access among different socioeconomic groups; and to relate access to these nutrition drivers to nutrition outcomes. All Hands on Deck: Reducing Stunting through Multisectoral Efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa addresses three main questions: • Do children have inadequate access to the underlying determinants of nutrition? • What is the association between stunting and inadequate food, care practices, health, and WASH access? • Can the sectors that have the greatest impact on stunting be identified? This book provides country authorities with a holistic picture of the gaps in access to the drivers of nutrition within countries to assist them in the formulation of a more informed, evidence-based, and balanced multisectoral strategy against undernutrition.