Person:
Das, Maitreyi Bordia
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Demography,
Social Protection,
Social Development,
Human Development,
Social Inclusion,
Safety Nets,
Equity,
Labor Markets,
Urban Development
Degrees
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
April 3, 2023
Biography
Maitreyi Bordia Das is the Director for Trust Funds and Partner Relations in the Development Finance Vice Presidency of the World Bank. Based in Washington DC, she leads the furtherance of the World Bank’s trust fund reform, implementation of the Bank’s policy framework for financial intermediary funds (FIFs) and supports the ongoing World Bank Group Evolution process. Maitreyi is a leading voice to sustainable development, equity and inclusion, with a career that spans government, academia, the UN system and the World Bank. At the Bank, Maitreyi has held several advisory and managerial positions and led numerous research, policy and programmatic initiatives across urban development, resilience, water security, health, social protection and social development. She was the World Bank’s first Global Lead for Social Inclusion, is a speaker at various public forums and has an extensive publications record. In her last position as Manager in the Global Practice on Urban, Resilience and Land, she oversaw and expanded a wide range of trust funded global programs and partnerships. Having started her career as a lecturer in St Stephen's College, University of Delhi, Maitreyi has also been a MacArthur Fellow at the Harvard Center of Population and Development Studies and an advisor to the United Nations Development Program in Guyana. She has a PhD in Sociology (Demography) from the University of Maryland. Before joining the World Bank, Maitreyi was in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS).
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 22
-
Publication
Social Protection in Low Income Countries and Fragile Situations : Challenges and Future Directions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-03)Demand for social protection is growing in low income countries and fragile situations. In recent years, the success of social protection (SP) interventions in middle income countries (MICs) like Brazil and Mexico, along with the series of food, fuel, and financial crises, has prompted policymakers in low income countries (LICs) and fragile situations (FSs) to examine the possibility of introducing such programs in their own countries. Flagship programs in countries as diverse as Ethiopia, India, Pakistan, and Rwanda have shown the adaptability of social protection interventions to the LIC context. Yet, despite growing levels of support for these initiatives, many challenges remain. In LICs and FSs, governments are confronted with a nexus of mutually reinforcing deficits that increase the need for SP programs and simultaneously reduce their ability to successfully respond. Governments face hard choices about the type, affordability, and sustainability of SP interventions. The paper reviews how these factors affect SP programs in these countries and identifies ways to address the deficits. It supports the establishment of resilient SP systems to address specific needs and vulnerabilities and to respond flexibly to both slow and sudden onset crises. To achieve this, both innovation and pragmatism are required in three strategic areas: (i) building the basic blocks of SP systems (e.g., targeting, payments, and monitoring and evaluation); (ii) ensuring financial sustainability; and (iii) promoting good governance and transparency. These issues suggest the possibility of a different trajectory in the development of social protection in LICs than in MICs. The implications for World Bank support include the need to focus on increasing knowledge and operational effectiveness of SP programs, fostering institutional links between multiple SP programs, and using community capacity and technological innovations to overcome bottlenecks in operations. -
Publication
Changing Norms about Gender Inequality in Education : Evidence from Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-11)Using a recent household survey for two cohorts of married women, this paper examines norms about gender equality in education for children and adults. Among the main findings are that gender education gap norms have changed: younger generations of women are more positive about female vs. male education, both as pertaining to child and adult education outcomes. Perhaps the strongest result is that Bangladeshi women are more likely to espouse attitudes of gender equality in education for their children and less so about gender equality among spouses. It is also easier to explain norms regarding children's education and more difficult to explain norms about equality in marriages. The authors believe that question on relative education of boys and girls captures the value of education per se, while the question on educational equality in marriage captures the norms regarding marriage and the relative worth of husbands and wives. The effect of education in determining norms is significant though complex, and spans own and spousal education, as well as that of older females in the household. This indicates sharing of education norms effects or externalities arising from spousal education in the production of gender education gap norms within marriage as well as arising from the presence of older educated females in the household. Lastly, the authors also find associations between gender education gap norms and household poverty, information processing and religion, though the evidence here is more mixed. -
Publication
Minority Status and Labor Market Outcomes : Does India Have Minority Enclaves?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)This paper uses data from the 61st Round of the National Sample Survey to understand the employment outcomes of Dalit and Muslim men in India. It uses a conceptual framework developed for the US labor market that states that ethnic minorities skirt discrimination in the primary labor market to build successful self-employed ventures in the form of ethnic enclaves or ethnic labor markets. The paper uses entry into self-employment for educated minority groups as a proxy for minority enclaves. Based on multinomial logistic regression, the analysis finds that the minority enclave hypothesis does not hold for Dalits but it does overwhelmingly for Muslims. The interaction of Dalit and Muslim status with post-primary education in urban areas demonstrates that post-primary education confers almost a disadvantage for minority men: it does not seem to affect their allocation either to salaried work or to non-farm self-employment but does increase their likelihood of opting out of the labor force - and if they cannot afford to drop out, they join the casual labor market. Due to the complexity of these results and the fact that there are no earnings data for self-employment, it is difficult to say whether self-employment is a choice or compulsion and whether builders of minority enclaves fare better than those in the primary market. -
Publication
Enterprises, Workers, and Skills in Urban Timor-Leste
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-03)Like many low-income countries, Timor-Leste faces challenges in providing employment for and increasing the skills of its labor force-challenges made more acute by high fertility rates, a very young population, and the capacity constraints of a new nation. However, there is limited information for policymakers to formulate appropriate policies. The paper presents findings of the first urban enterprise survey in independent Timor-Leste. It explores several aspects of the Timorese urban labor market, including the profile of formal and informal enterprises, their behavior in terms of employment and wage-setting practices, and constraints on firm growth. It also presents findings on the skills and training needs of urban employers, and constraints faced in overcoming skills shortages. It finds a highly informal urban enterprise scene, where even "formal" enterprises are largely micro-enterprises. While there has been considerable action in terms of new firm creation since independence, there is already surprisingly low job creation or destruction. This is driven by a number of constraints inside and outside the labor market. With respect to wages, the impacts of the informal minimum wage policy inherited from the interim international administration suggest the need for caution in future wage policy development. While employers identify many skills gaps, basic literacy, numeracy, and language skill needs dominate, and employers appear to value short courses and less formal modes of skills training to address their needs. The paper concludes with suggestions for addressing the key constraints identified. -
Publication
Exclusion and Discrimination in the Labor Market
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01)The frameworks developed in this paper are based on a review of the literature on processes of discrimination and the norms and attitudes that accompany them. Intended as a background paper to the World Development Report 2013 this paper will also feed into the Social Inclusion Flagship Report by the Social Development Department at the World Bank. It is divided into six sections. This section one is an introduction to the objectives and provides the context for this work. Section two is a brief discussion of the conceptual underpinnings and measurement of labor market discrimination from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Section three lays out a typology of processes of discrimination, while section four is a discussion of the mechanisms of discrimination and the ways in which candidates are screened. Section five addresses the question of how discriminated groups react to discrimination. The final section addresses some of the ways in which occupational and labor market mobility is possible for disadvantaged groups and what policy implications it could have. -
Publication
Scaling the Heights : Social Inclusion and Sustainable Development in Himachal Pradesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-01)Himachal Pradesh has the reputation of being stable, inclusive, cohesive and well-governed and it stands apart in many respects from its neighbors in northern India. It has additionally, achieved remarkable growth, especially in the last two decades, which has been accompanied by very good human development outcomes. Despite being a predominantly rural society, educational attainment in Himachal Pradesh for instance, is among the best in the country; poverty headcount is nearly one-third of the national average; life expectancy is 3.4 years longer than the number of years an average Indian expects to live; and, per capita income is the second highest among "special category" states in India. Underlying its strong economic and social development outcomes is Himachal Pradesh's commitment to expand access to public services to the remotest areas, across tough, hilly terrain and its strong institutional foundations. Inter-group disparities are low in a state where traditionally disadvantaged groups such as the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) make up a solid 30 percent of the population. -
Publication
All in My Head?: The Play of Exclusion and Discrimination in the Labor Market
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)Labor market discrimination is very difficult to pinpoint, even more difficult to measure and almost impossible to “prove”. It has been studied in many disciplines of which economics and sociology are prime. The latter has focused more on the manner in which discrimination plays out and how it is related to different forms of social stratification. This paper reviews the literature and makes two main contributions: first, it builds a four-fold typology to think about discrimination—overt or covert; conscious or unconscious; legal or illegal and real or perceived. Second, it identifies screens and filters—devices through which discrimination plays out in the labor market. Unless more empirical studies identify the play of discrimination and exclusion, subordinate groups may well be told that discrimination is actually in their heads—that they are imagining it. -
Publication
Social Inclusion in Macro-Level Diagnostics: Reflecting on the World Bank Group's Early Systematic Country Diagnostics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06)The idea of social inclusion has garnered considerable attention, especially in the context of two recent developments: the Sustainable Development Goals and the heightened attention to inequality. This paper reviews the manner and extent to which social inclusion is addressed in the first 17 Systematic Country Diagnostics (SCDs), which are ex ante, country-level assessments conducted by the World Bank Group, ahead of the preparation of its Country Partnership Frameworks. In addition to this primary purpose, the paper fulfils three other purposes. It allows for a broader reflection on the value of the social inclusion construct in macro-level diagnostics; it takes the opportunity to develop and refine a methodology to assess social inclusion and finally, it positions the narrative on social inclusion into the ongoing discourse on poverty, shared prosperity, inequality and the thinking around the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is therefore, a refined articulation of the idea of social inclusion in the context of global epistemological shifts -
Publication
Poverty and Social Exclusion in India: Women
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012)This brief describes the poverty and social exclusion of Women in India. The last few decades have seen remarkable progress in the status of women and girls, yet the cultural roots of gender inequality are still strong and affect a range of outcomes. The high salaries and independent lifestyles of women in urban India have captured public imagination. Yet progress has been very uneven and slower than would have been expected based on India’s levels of per capita income. Females still have an overall survival deficit in childhood and during their reproductive years and are severely disadvantaged in the labor market. Inequalities in wages are a disincentive for women to work, but they clearly want work!. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is an example of a program that explicitly seeks to provide paid work to poor women. The scheme mandates that at least one-third of workers should be women and makes several provisions to enhance the participation of women. Threats to women’s security also influence the ability of women to access markets and services and claim spaces for themselves. This is an area in which policy can have a huge effect. Making public spaces safe for women is a major step forward in enhancing women’s access to these spaces. -
Publication
Poverty and Social Exclusion in India: Dalits
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012)This brief is based on a Poverty and Social Exclusion in India.Caste is perhaps the oldest form of social stratificationin India.After independence, the Indian Constitution abolisheduntouchability and the erstwhile untouchablescame to be known as the Scheduled Castes(SCs).The situation of Dalits has undergone dramatic transformation over time.While caste has had significant implications for poverty and other welfare outcomes, this note focuseson two arenas—education and the labor market.Our analysis based on the National Sample Survey(NSS) data suggests that there has been expansion in education among Dalits, but not at the samepace as among the upper castes.Micro studies continue to document discrimination against SC students. In the labor market, Dalits remain largely in casuallabor. Education is considered a panacea to poor labor market outcomes and overall it has positive effects for all men.It would nevertheless be naïve to dismiss the changes in caste dynamics, more so over the past two decades. Attendant to the economic changes, social movements asserting the power of Dalits have swept some states and have given Dalits a sense of political voice and agency. In sum, we find that despite localized changes,there have been modest changes for Dalits in the aggregate.