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Islam, Asif M.

Office of the Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa
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Last updated: December 19, 2024
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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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2016 - 20192
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Has files: true × Start date: 2014 × End date: 2019 × Author: virtual::1934cc1e-17d1-5f6c-b6b3-98af927e953d ×

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    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.
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    The Drivers and Impacts of Water Infrastructure Reliability: A Global Analysis of Manufacturing Firms
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11) Islam, Asif; Hyland, Marie
    Inadequate infrastructure impedes the productivity of manufacturing firms, with negative consequences for the wider economy. This study examines how water infrastructure copes with severe weather fluctuations and analyzes the effect of unreliable water supplies on the productivity of manufacturing firms, focusing predominately on firms in developing economies. This is achieved using firm-level data from World Bank Enterprise Surveys covering more than 16,000 manufacturing firms in a cross-section of 103 countries between 2009 and 2015. The study finds that periods of significantly low rainfall lead to higher water outages, and that the overall impact is driven by the effects of drought on low-income and lower-middle-income economies, with upper-middle-income and high-income economies benefitting from more resilient water infrastructure. Furthermore, the study finds that incidents of water outages lead to lower firm productivity for firms in less developed economies. For the average firm located in a low-income or lower-middle-income economy, one additional water outage incident per day in a typical month can lead to losses of approximately 8.2 percent of annual sales. This finding calls for increased policy focus on water infrastructure services, particularly in poorer countries where water infrastructure and firms seem to be particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of rainfall.