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Islam, Asif M.

Office of the Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa

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Office of the Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa

Last updated: September 25, 2024

Biography

Asif Islam is a senior economist for the Middle East and North Africa Region of the World Bank Group. His research focuses on private sector development. He has published in peer-reviewed journals on several dimensions of the private sector including entrepreneurship, technology, crime, informality, and gender. He has also published on fiscal policy, environment, and agriculture. He co-authored several reports including the World Development Report (2019) - The Changing Nature of Work, What's Holding Back the Private Sector in MENA? Lessons from the Enterprise Survey, and Uncharted Waters: The New Economics of Water Scarcity and Variability. He holds a PhD in Applied Economics from the University of Maryland-College Park, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Computer Science from Macalester College.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 29

Uncharted Waters: The New Economics of Water Scarcity and Variability
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-10-24) Damania, Richard; Desbureaux, Sébastien; Hyland, Marie; Islam, Asif; Rodella, Aude-Sophie; Russ, Jason; Zaveri, Esha
The 21st century will witness the collision of two powerful forces – burgeoning population growth, together with a changing climate. With population growth, water scarcity will proliferate to new areas across the globe. And with climate change, rainfall will become more fickle, with longer and deeper periods of droughts and deluges. This report presents new evidence to advance understanding on how rainfall shocks coupled with water scarcity, impacts farms, firms, and families. On farms, the largest consumers of water in the world, impacts are channeled from declining yields to changing landscapes. In cities, water extremes especially when combined with unreliable infrastructure can stall firm production, sales, and revenue. At the center of this are families, who feel the impacts of this uncertainty on their incomes, jobs, and long-term health and welfare. Although a rainfall shock may be fleeting, its consequences can become permanent and shape the destiny of those who experience it. Pursuing business as usual will lead many countries down a “parched path” where droughts shape destinies. Avoiding this misery in slow motion will call for fundamental changes to water policy around the globe. Building resilience to rainfall variability will require using different policy instruments to address the multifaceted nature of water. A key message of this report is that water has multiple economic attributes, each of which entail distinct policy responses. If water is not managed more prudently—from source, to tap, and back to source—the crises observed today will become the catastrophes of tomorrow.
Does Paternity Leave Matter for Female Employment in Developing Economies?: Evidence from Firm Data
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03) Amin, Mohammad; Islam, Asif; Sakhonchik, Alena
For a sample of 53 developing countries, the results show that women's employment among private firms is significantly higher in countries that mandate paternity leave versus those that do not. A conservative estimate suggests an increase of 6.8 percentage points in the proportion of women workers associated with the mandating of paternity leave.
Paid Maternity Leave and Female Employment: Evidence Using Firm-Level Survey Data for Developing Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01) Amin, Mohammad; Islam, Asif
The relationship between the length of paid maternity leave and the proportion of female workers in the private sector is explored using firm-level survey data for 66 mostly developing countries. The paper finds a large, positive, and statistically significant relationship between the two. According to the most conservative estimate, an increase of one week of paid maternity leave is associated with a 2.6 percentage points increase in the share of workers in a typical firm that are female. As expected, the stated relationship is much larger when the government pays for maternity leave versus the employer. The results are robust to several controls for firm and country characteristics and other possible heterogeneities in the maternity leave and female workers relationship.
Decomposing the Labour Productivity Gap between Migrant-Owned and Native-Owned Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Taylor and Francis, 2018-09-18) Islam, Asif; Amin, Mohammad
Migration studies have been primarily based on the movement of individuals from developing to developed economies, with a focus on the impact of migrants on host country wages. In this study we take a different angle by exploring the labor productivity of migrant-owned firms versus native-owned firms in 20 African economies using firm-level data. We find that labor productivity is 78 per cent higher in migrant-owned firms than native-owned firms. Using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method we find that structural effects account for 80 per cent of the labor productivity gap. Returns to manager education largely explain the productivity advantage of migrant-owned firms over native-owned firms. Interactions with the government, access to finance, informality, and power outages are also considerable contributors to the labor productivity gap.
Women Managers and the Gender-Based Gap in Access to Education: Evidence from Firm-Level Data in Developing Countries
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-10-06) Islam, Asif
A number of studies explore the differences in men's and women's labor market participation rates and wages. Some of these differences have been linked to gender disparities in education access and attainment. The present paper contributes to this literature by analyzing the relationship between the proclivity of a firm having a top woman manager and access to education among women relative to men in the country. The study combines the literature on women's careers in management, which has mostly focused on developed countries, with the development literature that has emphasized the importance of access to education. Using firm-level data for seventy-three developing countries in 2007–10, the study finds strong evidence that countries with a higher proportion of top women managers also have higher enrollment rates for women relative to men in primary, secondary, and tertiary education.
Public Procurement Regulation and Road Quality
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-11) Djankov, Simeon; Ghossein, Tania; Islam, Asif Mohammed; Saliola, Federica
Public procurement regulation is an important instrument for using public resources efficiently and ensuring quality services to citizens. On average, the public procurement sector accounts for 14.5 percent of the gross domestic product globally. Using new data, this study documents public procurement regulation and related processes in 142 economies. Scores for three public procurement areas are constructed and amalgamated into an overall quality of public procurement index. The index is then related to a measure of road quality across countries. The results indicate that improvement in the public procurement system improves road quality, especially in non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.
Women Managers and the Gender-Based Gap in Access to Education: Evidence from Firm-Level Data in Developing Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05) Amin, Mohammad; Islam, Asif
Several studies explore the differences in men’s and women’s labor market participation rates and wages. Some of these differences have been linked to gender disparities in education attainment and access. The present paper contributes to this literature by analyzing the relationship between the proclivity of a firm to have a female top manager and access to education among women relative to men in the country. The paper combines the literature on women’s careers in management, which has mostly focused on developed countries, with the development literature that has emphasized the importance of access to education. Using firm-level data for 73 developing countries, the analysis finds strong evidence that countries with a higher proportion of female top managers also have higher enrollment rates for women relative to men in primary, secondary, and tertiary education.
Are There More Female Managers in the Retail Sector? Evidence from Survey Data in Developing Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-04) Amin, Mohammad; Islam, Asif
This paper uses firm-level data for 87 developing countries to analyze how the likelihood of a firm having female vs. male top manager varies across sectors. The service sector is often considered to be more favorable toward women compared with men vis-à-vis the manufacturing sector. Although the exploration of the data confirms a significantly higher presence of female managers in services vs. manufacturing, the finding is entirely driven by retail firms, with little contribution from other service sectors, such as wholesale, construction, and other services. The analysis also finds that the higher presence of female managers in the retail sector vs. manufacturing is much higher among the relatively small firms and firms located in the relatively small cities. These findings could serve as useful inputs for the design of optimal policy measures aimed at promoting gender equality in a country.
Public Procurement and the Private Business Sector: Evidence from Firm-Level Data
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-09) Ghossein, Tania; Islam, Asif Mohammed; Saliola, Federica
The quality of the public procurement system of an economy can have far-reaching effects on the private sector. This paper empirically explores several of these effects using two rich data sets. An overall indicator of public procurement quality is created from the World Bank’s Benchmarking Public Procurement project that is then combined with firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys. The analysis includes more than 59,000 firms spanning more than 109 economies. The paper finds that firms in economies with good public procurement systems are more likely to participate in public procurement, face lower losses from shipping to domestic markets, and experience lower incidence of bribery than economies with poor public procurement systems. Similarly, better public procurement systems are positively correlated with more engagement in innovation, research and development, international certification, foreign technology adoption, and online connectivity.
The Time Cost of Documents to Trade
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-06-04) Amin, Mohammad; Islam, Asif
The article shows that the number of documents required to export and import tend to increase the time cost of shipments. However, the increase in the time cost of increased documentation is much larger for countries that are relatively poor and large in size. One interpretation here is that the relatively rich countries that have more resources and the relatively small countries that rely more on trade invest more in building efficient documentation systems. Our findings suggest caution in interpreting how input-based measures, such as the number of required documents to trade, affect outcome measures.