Person:
Verme, Paolo
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Welfare,
Poverty,
Inequality,
Labor markets,
Refugees,
Middle East,
North Africa,
former Soviet Union
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Global Practice on Poverty and Inequality
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Paolo Verme is Lead Economist at the World Bank. A Ph.D. graduate of the London School of Economics, he was Visiting Professor at Bocconi University in Milan (2004-2009) and at the University of Turin (2003-2010) before joining the World Bank in 2010. For almost two decades, he served as senior advisor and project manager for multilateral organizations, private companies and governments in the areas of labor market, welfare and social protection policies. His research is widely published in international journals, books and reports. His most recent book is on the welfare of Syrian refugees, a joint study between the World Bank and the UNHCR.
Publication Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
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Publication
Top Incomes and the Measurement of Inequality in Egypt
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2013-08)By all accounts, income inequality in Egypt is low and had been declining during the decade that preceded the 2011 revolution. As the Egyptian revolution was partly motivated by claims of social injustice and inequalities, this seems at odds with a low level of income inequality. Moreover, while income inequality shows a decline between 2000 and 2009, the World Values Surveys indicate that the aversion to inequality has significantly increased during the same period and for all social groups. This paper utilizes a range of recently developed statistical techniques to assess the true value of income inequality in the presence of a range of possible measurement issues related to top incomes, including item and unit non-response, outliers and extreme observations, and atypical top income distributions. The analysis finds that correcting for unit non-response significantly increases the estimate of inequality by just over 1 percentage point, that the Egyptian distribution of top incomes follows rather closely the Pareto distribution, and that the inverted Pareto coefficient is located around median values when compared with 418 household surveys worldwide. Hence, income inequality in Egypt is confirmed to be low while the distribution of top incomes is not atypical compared with what Pareto had predicted and compared with other countries in the world. This would suggest that the increased frustration with income inequality voiced by Egyptians and measured by the World Values Surveys is driven by factors other than income inequality. -
Publication
The Quest for Subsidies Reforms in the Middle East and North Africa Region: A Microsimulation Approach to Policy Making
(Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017)The objective of this book is to capitalize on the work undertaken by the World Bank in the MENA Region between 2010 and 2014 using a particular model specifically designed for the distributional analysis of subsidies and the simulation of subsidies reforms. The model is called “SUBSIM” and has been used uniformly in all the seven countries where the World Bank operated. The focus of the book is the distribution of subsidies and the simulation of subsidy reforms in a partial equilibrium framework. The distributional analysis of subsidies provides information on who benefits from existing subsidies, and the simulations of subsidy reforms provide information on the outcomes of the reforms in terms of government budget, household welfare, poverty, inequality, and the trade-offs between these outcomes. It is a partial equilibrium approach in that we focus on the final consumption market only. The book covers energy and food subsidies. The countries covered are Djibouti, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Republic of Yemen. -
Publication
Top Incomes and the Measurement of Inequality in Egypt
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2018-06)This study exploits unprecedented access to income data and a combination of newly developed statistical methods to evaluate income inequality in Egypt and test for potential top incomes biases. Income inequality in Egypt is found to be low by regional and world standards; top incomes are found to follow the Pareto distribution and do not show anomalies compared to surveys worldwide. Correcting for top incomes biases increases the Gini coefficient significantly. The magnitude of the upward correction varies between 1.1 and 4.1 percentage points depending on the choice of correction method and welfare measure.