Cojocaru, Alexandru

Person:
Cojocaru, Alexandru

Poverty and Equity Global Practice, World Bank

Author Name Variants

Cojocaru, Alexandru

Fields of Specialization

Poverty, Inequality, Subjective well-being

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RePEc

Departments

Poverty and Equity Global Practice, World Bank

Last updated:November 28, 2025

Biography

Alexandru Cojocaru is a senior economist with the Poverty and Equity Global Practice at the World Bank, where his work focuses on the analysis of poverty, inequality, and social exclusion. Alexandru has worked on a number of policy areas, including poverty mapping, targeting of social assistance, and the distributional analysis of energy sector reforms. His research interests also include the analysis of socio-economic mobility, inequality of opportunity, and subjective well-being. His work has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Comparative Economics, European Journal of Political Economy, Economics of Transition and Social Indicators Research. Alexandru holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and an M.S. from Georgetown University.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/10986/39078

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Publication Search Results

Now showing1 - 10 of 20

Perceptions of Economic Mobility and Support for Education Reforms
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-12) Cojocaru, Alexandru; Lokshin, Michael; Torre, Iván
This paper investigates the relationship between the expectations of economic mobility and support for tax-financed education reforms using data from the Life in Transition Survey, which covers 39 countries in Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa. The analysis demonstrates that individuals who expect themselves or their children to be upwardly mobile are more likely to support tax-financed education reforms. This correlation is robust to different formulations of mobility expectations and persists over a decade, encompassing both stable and post-crisis economic environments. The relationship is partially mediated by beliefs about the fairness of economic opportunities in society and individuals’ readiness to embrace risks.
Questioning the Climate Change Age Gap
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-24) Cojocaru, Alexandru; Lokshin, Michael; Nikandrova, Arina
A widely held view in the media and among some researchers is that younger people are more worried about climate change and more willing to support the climate agenda than older generations. Such a “climate change age gap” is often explained by the longer time younger people expect to live under worsening climatic conditions. This paper develops a theoretical model that proposes an alternative explanation for the relationship between age and attitudes toward climate change. The empirical analysis is based on data from 38 countries in Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East from the 2023 round of the Life in Transition Survey. The findings demonstrate a positive relationship between the respondents’ age and their concerns about climate change. Older people are more likely to object to higher taxes to finance public policies in general, including climate change policies, but even this result is sensitive to the framing of climate action questions.
Why Did Support for Climate Policies Decline in Europe and Central Asia?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-23) Cojocaru, Alexandru; Lokshin, Michael M.; Torre, Ivan
This paper investigates trends in willingness to pay higher taxes to combat climate change in countries of Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia between 2016 and 2023. Using data from the Life in Transition Survey, it shows that despite increasing attention from policy makers, scientists, and the media, the average shares of respondents willing to pay to combat climate change declined over this period. The paper tests several hypotheses that could explain the deterioration of public readiness to support climate change policies. The most likely explanation is the growing politicization of the climate change agenda in the region.
Guidelines to Small Area Estimation for Poverty Mapping
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022-06-16) Corral, Paul; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Segovia, Sandra; Molina, Isabel
The eradication of poverty, which was the first of the millennium development goals (MDG) established by the United Nations and followed by the sustainable development goals (SDG), requires knowing where the poor are located. Traditionally, household surveys are considered the best source of information on the living standards of a country’s population. Data from these surveys typically provide a sufficiently accurate direct estimate of household expenditures or income and thus estimates of poverty at the national level and larger international regions. However, when one starts to disaggregate data by local areas or population subgroups, the quality of these direct estimates diminishes. Consequently, national statistical offices (NSOs) cannot provide reliable wellbeing statistical figures at a local level. For example, the module of socioeconomic conditions of the Mexican national survey of household income and expenditure (ENIGH) is designed to produce estimates of poverty and inequality at the national level and for the 32 federate entities (31 states and Mexico City) with disaggregation by rural and urban zones, every two years, but there is a mandate to produce estimates by municipality every five years, and the ENIGH alone cannot provide estimates for all municipalities with adequate precision. This makes monitoring progress toward the sustainable development goals more difficult.
COVID-19 School Closures, Learning Losses and Intergenerational Mobility
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-28) Azevedo, João Pedro; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Talledo, Veronica Montalva; Narayan, Ambar
The paper presents a first global investigation of the longer-term inequality implications of COVID-19 by examining the effect of school closures on the ability of children from different countries and backgrounds to engage in continued learning throughout the pandemic, and their implications for intergenerational mobility in education. The analysis builds on the data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility, country-specific results of the learning loss simulation model using weekly school closure information from February 2020 to February 2022, and high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank during the pandemic to assess the incidence and quality of continued learning during periods of school closures across children from different backgrounds. Based on this information, the paper simulates counterfactual levels of educational attainment and corresponding absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility measures with and without COVID-19 impacts, to arrive at estimates of COVID-19 impacts. The simulations suggest that the extensive school closures and associated learning losses are likely to have a significant impact on both absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility in the absence of remedial measures. In upper-middle-income countries, the share of children with more years of education than their parents (absolute mobility) could decline by 8 percentage points, with the largest impacts observed in the Latin America region. Furthermore, unequal access to continued learning during school closures across children from households of different socioeconomic backgrounds (proxied by parental education levels) leads to a significant decline in relative educational mobility.
Tracing Pandemic Impacts in the Absence of Regular Survey Data: What Have We Learned from the World Bank’s High-Frequency Phone Surveys?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-10-10) Brunckhorst, Ben; Kim, Yeon Soo; Cojocaru, Alexandru
The World Bank’s High-Frequency Phone Surveys were deployed to support the monitoring of household welfare during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the regular household survey data collection was suspended. This paper reviews the analytical insights gained from the High-Frequency Phone Survey data, including uneven dynamics of household welfare during the pandemic across and within countries, as well as novel applications to simulate estimates of poverty and intergenerational mobility following the pandemic. The paper further derives lessons from the data collection experience. First, phone surveys, while inexpensive and quick, require reliable sampling frames. The predominant sampling strategies—previous household survey and random digit dialing—each have pros and cons in terms of representativeness, non-response, and post-survey adjustments. Second, on questionnaire design, country customization needs to be carefully balanced against standardization when cross-country comparisons are likely to be important. Finally, baseline metrics are critical for crisis monitoring; this requires more frequent welfare monitoring and better alignment of questions in phone surveys and existing data sources. While phone surveys can be a reliable toolkit for researchers and governments, more research is needed on key questions related to the survey mode effect, and the implications of different sampling frames and questionnaire design.
Long COVID: The Evolution of Household Welfare in Developing Countries during the Pandemic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-02) Brunckhorst, Ben; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Hill, Ruth; Kim, Yeon Soo; Kugler, Maurice
This paper examines the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, using harmonized data from 343 high-frequency phone surveys conducted in 80 economies during 2020 and 2021, representing more than 2.5 billion people. The analysis focuses on the scarring effects of the initial losses of employment and income by examining their evolution over time across and within countries, as restrictions on mobility and economic activity were introduced and then gradually relaxed. The employment and welfare outcomes of some groups that were impacted to a greater degree initially—including women, informal workers, and those with less education—have been improving at a slower pace. The social protection response in lower-income economies was largely insufficient to protect households from the pandemic shock. Unmitigated welfare losses, as seen for example from the large share of households indicating income losses well into 2021, are highly correlated with food insecurity, which likely led some households to sell physical assets and deplete their savings. Without proper remediation, the uneven welfare impacts associated with COVID-19 may be amplified over the medium to long term, leading to future increases in poverty and inequality.
COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in 53 Developing Countries: Levels, Trends, and Reasons for Hesitancy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09) Eberwein, Julia Dayton; Edochie, Ifeanyi; Newhouse, David; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Deudibe, Gildas; Kakietek, Jakub; Kim, Yeon Soo; Montes, Jose
This paper presents new evidence on the levels and trends of vaccine hesitancy in developing countries based on harmonized high-frequency phone surveys from more than 120,000 respondents in 53 low- and middle-income countries. These countries represent a combined 30 percent of the population of low- and middle-income countries. On average across countries, one in five adults is hesitant about the COVID-19 vaccine, with the most cited reasons for hesitancy being concerns about the safety of the vaccine, followed by concerns about its efficacy. Between late 2020 and the first half of 2021, there tended to be little change in levels of hesitancy except in Iraq, Malawi, and Uzbekistan, where hesitancy increased. COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is higher among female, young, less educated, and rural respondents, after controlling for selected observable characteristics. Country estimates of vaccine hesitancy from the high-frequency phone surveys are correlated with but lower than those from earlier studies, which often relied on less representative survey samples. The results suggest that vaccine hesitancy in developing countries, while less prevalent than previously thought, will be an important and enduring obstacle to recovery from the pandemic.
COVID-19 and Economic Inequality: Short-Term Impacts with Long-Term Consequences
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01) Agrawal, Sarthak; Narayan, Ambar; Bundervoet, Tom; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Davalos, Maria; Garcia, Natalia; Montalva Talledo, Veronica; Lakner, Christoph; Ten, Andrey; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Yonzan, Nishant
This paper examines the short-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for inequality in developing countries. The analysis takes advantage of high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank to assess the distributional impacts of the pandemic through the channels of job and income losses, food insecurity, and children’s education in the early days of the pandemic and subsequent period of economic recovery leading up to early 2021. It also introduces a methodology for estimating changes in income inequality due to the pandemic by combining data from phone surveys, pre-pandemic household surveys, and macroeconomic projections of sectoral growth rates. The paper finds that the pandemic had dis-equalizing impacts both across and within countries. Even under the assumption of distribution-neutral impacts within countries, the projected income losses are estimated to be higher in the bottom half of the global income distribution. Within countries, disadvantaged groups were more likely to have experienced work and income losses initially and are recovering more slowly. Inequality simulations suggest an increase in the Gini index for 29 of 34 countries in the sample, with an average increase of about 1 percent. Although these short-term impacts on inequality appear to be small, they suggest that projections of global poverty and inequality impacts of COVID-19 under the assumption of distribution-neutral changes within countries are likely to underestimate actual impacts. Finally, the paper argues that the overall inequality impacts of COVID-19 could be larger over the medium-to-long term on account of a slow and uneven recovery in many developing countries, and disparities in learning losses during pandemic-related school closures, which will likely have long-lasting effects on inequality of opportunity and social mobility.
COVID-19 and Inequality: How Unequal Was the Recovery from the Initial Shock?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Agrawal, Sarthak; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Montalva, Veronica; Narayan, Ambar; Bundervoet, Tom; Ten, Andrey
The restrictions on mobility and economic activity that were put in place to mitigate the health impacts of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic have had an unequal impact both across and within countries, with vulnerable populations within developing countries being affected disproportionately. An important concern is that the recovery may be similarly inequitable. Across the 17 developing countries in our sample, where policies became more conducive to mobility and economic activity, we indeed observe a partial recovery of employment and incomes in most countries, as well as improvements in food security. Although job recovery and lower policy stringency were accompanied by an overall fall in the share of the food-insecure population from 13 percent to 9 percent, those living in rural areas witnessed slower declines in food insecurity. However, the recovery was not only incomplete, but also uneven within countries. In particular, the recovery in employment among those who suffered larger initial shocks - - women, non-college-educated, and urban workers - - was not sufficient to significantly reduce the initial disparities in losses. By August-September, female employment had only recovered 30 percent of what was lost between pre-pandemic and May-June (versus 49 percent for men). Finally, more recent data for a smaller number of countries up to January 2021 indicates that while food security continued improving in these countries, recovery in employment appears to have stalled, while the disparities by gender and education persisted.