Dabalen, Andrew

Person:
Dabalen, Andrew

Chief Economist, Africa, World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Poverty, Inequality, Economics of education, Development economics, Labor economics

Departments

Chief Economist, Africa, World Bank

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

Andrew Dabalen is the World Bank’s Africa Region Chief Economist since July 1, 2022. The Chief Economist is responsible for providing guidance on strategic priorities and the technical quality of economic analysis in the region, as well as for developing major regional economic studies, among other roles. He has held various positions including Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia Region, Lead Economist and Practice Manager for Poverty and Equity in Africa and most recently, Practice Manager for Poverty and Equity in the South Asia Region. His research and scholarly publications focused on poverty and social impact analysis, inequality of opportunity, program evaluation, risk and vulnerability, labor markets, and conflict and welfare outcomes. He has co-authored regional reports on equality of opportunity for children in Africa, vulnerability and resilience in the Sahel, and poverty in a rising Africa. He holds a master’s degree in International Development from University of California - Davis, and a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from University of California - Berkeley.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 21

Is Poverty in Africa Mostly Chronic or Transient?: Evidence from Synthetic Panel Data

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-04) Dang, Hai-Anh H. ; Dabalen, Andrew L.

Absent actual panel household survey data, this paper constructs, for the first time, synthetic panel data for more than 20 countries accounting for two-thirds of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this process, the analysis employs repeated cross sections that span, on average, a six-year period for each country. The analysis suggests that all these countries as a whole have had pro-poor growth. One-third of the poor population escaped poverty during the studied period, which is larger than the proportion of the population that fell into poverty in the same period. The region also saw a 9 percent reduction in poverty and a 28 percent increase in the size of the middle class. However, chronic poverty remains high, and a considerable proportion of the population is vulnerable to falling into poverty. There is some limited evidence that most resource-rich and middle-income countries have more upward mobility than downward mobility. Post-secondary education is especially strongly associated with higher upward mobility and less downward mobility, which holds to some extent for female-headed and urban households.
Informal Payments and Moonlighting in Tajikistan's Health Sector

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-03) Dabalen, Andrew ; Wane, Waly

This paper studies the relationship between gender and corruption in the health sector. It uses data collected directly from health workers, during a recent public expenditure tracking survey in Tajikistan's health sector. Using informal payments as an indicator of corruption, women seem at first significantly less corrupt than men as consistently suggested by the literature. However, once power conferred by position is controlled for, women appear in fact equally likely to take advantage of corruption opportunities as men. Female-headed facilities also are not less likely to experience informal charging than facilities managed by men. However, women are significantly less aggressive in the amount they extract from patients. The paper provides evidence that workers are more likely to engage in informal charging the farther they fall short of their perceived fair-wage, adding weight to the fair wage-corruption hypothesis. Finally, there is some evidence that health workers who feel that health care should be provided for a fee are more likely to informally charge patients. Contrary to informal charging, moonlighting behavior displays strong gender differences. Women are significantly less likely to work outside the facility on average and across types of health workers.
Collecting High Frequency Panel Data in Africa Using Mobile Phone Interviews

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-06) Croke, Kevin ; Dabalen, Andrew ; Demombybes, Gabriel ; Giugale, Marcelo ; Hoogeveen, Johannes

As mobile phone ownership rates have risen in Africa, there is increased interest in using mobile telephony as a data collection platform. This paper draws on two pilot projects that use mobile phone interviews for data collection in Tanzania and South Sudan. The experience was largely a success. High frequency panel data have been collected on a wide range of topics in a manner that is cost effective, flexible (questions can be changed over time) and rapid. And once households respond to the mobile phone interviews, they tend not to drop out: even after 33 rounds of interviews in the Tanzania survey, respondent fatigue proved not to be an issue. Attrition and non-response have been an issue in the Tanzania survey, but in ways that are related to the way this survey was originally set up and that are fixable. Data and reports from the Tanzania survey are available online and can be downloaded from: www.listeningtodar.org.
Estimating the Causal Effects of Conflict on Education in Côte d'Ivoire

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-06) Dabalen, Andrew L. ; Paul, Saumik

This paper estimates the causal effects of civil war on years of education in the context of a school-going age cohort that is exposed to armed conflict in Cote d'Ivoire. Using year and department of birth to identify an individual's exposure to war, the difference-in-difference outcomes indicate that the average years of education for a school-going age cohort is .94 years fewer compared with an older cohort in war-affected regions. To minimize the potential bias in the estimated outcome, the authors use a set of victimization indicators to identify the true effect of war. The propensity score matching estimates do not alter the main findings. In addition, the outcomes of double-robust models minimize the specification errors in the model. Moreover, the paper finds the outcomes are robust across alternative matching methods, estimation by using subsamples, and other education outcome variables. Overall, the findings across different models suggest a drop in average years of education by a range of .2 to .9 fewer years.
Mental Health and Socio-Economic Outcomes in Burundi

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-11) Baingana, Florence ; Dabalen, Andrew ; Menye, Essimi ; Prywes, Menahem ; Rosholm, Michael

This paper presents analysis of data from a survey of 5,599 respondents aged 10 years and older conducted country-wide in Burundi in 1998-99. The paper estimates statistically significant relationships between indicators of poor mental health and several social and economic outcomes. Most importantly, a worsening of mental health is associated with a decline in employment and with a decline in school enrollment of the subject's children. No relationship is found between mental health and poverty, once adjustments are made for demographic and regional influences. It argues that poor mental health diminishes people's participation in work and investment in their children's education through dysfunction resulting from psychiatric trauma and depression. Economic theory holds that investment in human capital, such as in education, will depend in part on expectations about the return on the investment.
History of Events and Life-satisfaction in Transition Countries

( 2011-01-01) Dabalen, Andrew ; Paul, Saumik

Using Life in Transition Survey data for 27 transition countries, the findings of this paper suggest that higher life satisfaction is correlated with lesser experience of unpleasant events such as labor market shock or economic distress, mostly in the recent past. Social capital such as trust, participation in civic groups, and financial stability lead to higher satisfaction, whereas lower relative position to a reference group leaves one with lower life satisfaction. The paper also finds substantial regional variation in life satisfaction between European, Balkan, and lower and middle-income Commonwealth of Independent States. Finally, after controlling for various events that took place during the interview and the nature of refusal of the respondents across countries, the authors show that reported life satisfaction is lower if the emotional state is negative during the interview.
Do African Children Have an Equal Chance? : A Human Opportunity Report for Sub-Saharan Africa

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015) Dabalen, Andrew ; Narayan, Ambar ; Saavedra-Chanduvi, Jaime ; Suarez, Alejandro Hoyos ; Abras, Ana ; Tiwari, Sailesh

This study explores the changing opportunities for children in Africa. While the definition of opportunities can be subjective and depend on the societal context, this report focuses on efforts to build future human capital, directly (through education and health investments) and indirectly (through complementary infrastructure such as safe water, adequate sanitation, electricity, and so on). It follows the practice of earlier studies conducted for the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region (Barros et al. 2009, 2012) where opportunities are basic goods and services that constitute investments in children. Although several opportunities are relevant at different stages of an individual s life, our focus on children s access to education, health services, safe water, and adequate nutrition is due to the well-known fact that an individual s chance of success in life is deeply influenced by access to these goods and services early in life. Children s access to these basic services improves the likelihood of a child being able to maximize his/her human potential and pursue a life of dignity.
The Effects of the Intensity, Timing, and Persistence of Personal History of Mobility on Support for Redistribution

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-03) Dabalen, Andrew ; Parinduri, Rasyad ; Paul, Saumik

This paper examines the association between the intensity, timing, and persistence of personal history of mobility on individual support for redistribution. Using both rounds of the Life in Transition Survey, the paper builds measures of downward mobility for about 57,000 individuals from 27 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The analysis finds that more intensive, recent, and persistent downward mobility increases support for redistribution more. A number of extensions and checks are done by, among others, taking into account systematic bias in perceived mobility experience, considering an alternative definition of redistributive preferences, and exploring the severity of omitted variable bias problems. Overall, the results are robust.
Can Agricultural Households Farm Their Way Out of Poverty?

(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-11) Oseni, Gbemisola ; McGee, Kevin ; Dabalen, Andrew

This paper examines the determinants of agricultural productivity and its link to poverty using nationally representative data from the Nigeria General Household Survey Panel, 2010/11. The findings indicate an elasticity of poverty reduction with respect to agricultural productivity of between 0.25 to 0.3 percent, implying that a 10 percent increase in agricultural productivity will decrease the likelihood of being poor by between 2.5 and 3 percent. To increase agricultural productivity, land, labor, fertilizer, agricultural advice, and diversification within agriculture are the most important factors. As commonly found in the literature, the results indicate the inverse-land size productivity relationship. More specifically, a 10 percent increase in harvested land size will decrease productivity by 6.6 percent, all else being equal. In a simulation exercise where land quality is assumed to be constant across small and large holdings, the results show that if farms in the top land quintile had half the median yield per hectare of farms in the lowest quintile, production of the top quintile would be 10 times higher. The higher overall values of harvests from larger land sizes are more likely because of cultivation of larger expanses of land, rather than from efficient production. It should be noted that having larger land sizes in itself is not positively correlated with a lower likelihood of being poor. This is not to say that having larger land sizes is not important for farming, but rather it indicates that increasing efficiency is the more important need that could lead to poverty reduction for agricultural households.
Data Deprivation: Another Deprivation to End

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04) Serajuddin, Umar ; Uematsu, Hiroki ; Wieser, Christina ; Yoshida, Nobuo ; Dabalen, Andrew

The Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty from its 1990 level will be achieved in 2015, and the international development community is now moving to a new goal of “ending extreme poverty.” However, the data needed to monitor progress remain severely limited. During the 10 year period between 2002 and 2011, as many as 57 countries have zero or only one poverty estimate. This paper refers to such lack of poverty data as “data deprivation,” because the poor are often socially marginalized and voiceless, and the collection of objective and quantitative data is crucial in locating them and formulating policy to help them exit extreme deprivation. This paper studies the extent of data deprivation and proposes targets for ending data deprivation by 2030—the year by when the international community aims to end extreme poverty. According to the analysis in this paper, this target is ambitious but possible, and achieving it is necessary to be able to declare the end of extreme poverty with confidence.