Person:
Verme, Paolo

Global Practice on Poverty and Inequality
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Welfare, Poverty, Inequality, Labor markets, Refugees, Middle East, North Africa, former Soviet Union
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0000-0002-8754-1138
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Global Practice on Poverty and Inequality
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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.
Citations 56 Scopus

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2010 - 20192
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Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    The Quest for Subsidies Reforms in the Middle East and North Africa Region: A Microsimulation Approach to Policy Making
    (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017) Araar, Abdelkrim; Verme, Paolo; Verme, Paolo; Araar, Abdelkrim; Ghosh Banerjee, Sudeshna; Brodmann, Stefanie; Choueiri, Nada; Coulombe, Harold; Clarke, Kieran; Cuesta, Jose; El Lahga, Abdel Rahmen; Griffin, Peter; Jellema, Jon; Fathy El-laithy, Heba Farida Ahmed; Hallouda, Mohab; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; El Massnaoui, Khalid; Dehzooei, Mohammadhadi Mostafavi; Salehi-Isfahani, Djavad; Serajuddin, Umar
    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.
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    The Quest for Subsidy Reforms in Libya
    (World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-03) Araar, Abdelkrim; Choueiri, Nada; Verme, Paolo
    Shortly before the 2011 Libyan revolution, consumers' subsidies were rapidly increased by the regime in an effort to reduce social discontent. In the aftermath of the revolution, these subsidies became important for people's subsistence, but also a very heavy burden for the state budget. Since then, the Libyan government has been confronted with the necessity of reforming subsidies in a politically and socially complex environment. This paper uses household survey data to provide a distributional analysis of food and energy subsidies and simulate the impact of subsidy reforms on household wellbeing, poverty, and the government's budget. Despite the focus on direct effects only, the results indicate that subsidy reforms would have a major impact on household welfare and government revenues. The elimination of food subsidies would reduce household expenditure by about 10 percent and double the poverty rate while saving the equivalent of about 2 percent of the government budget. The elimination of energy subsidies would have a similar effect on household welfare, but a larger effect on poverty while government savings would be almost 4 percent of the budget. The size of these effects, the weakness of market institutions, and the current political instability make subsidy reforms extremely complex in Libya. It is also clear that subsidy reforms will call for some form of compensation for the poor, a gradual rather than a big bang approach, and a product-by-product sequence of reforms rather than an all-inclusive reform.