Person:
Nguyen, Ha
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Financial Sector,
Private Sector Development,
Global Economy
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Development Research Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
July 5, 2023
Biography
Ha Minh Nguyen is an Economist in the Macroeconomics and Growth Team of the Development Research Group. He joined the Bank in July 2009 as a Young Economist after earning a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park. He also holds a M.A. and B.A. in economics from The University of Adelaide, Australia. His research interests include International Finance and Economic Growth. His current research is on the financial crisis and the real exchange rates.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 39
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Publication
Reality Check: Forecasting Growth in the Middle East and North Africa in Times of Uncertainty
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-04-11)The Middle East and North Africa economies face an uncertain recovery. The war in Ukraine presents significant challenges to the global economy and the MENA region. Inflationary pressures brought about by the pandemic are likely to be further exacerbated by the conflict. The potential for rising food prices is even higher, which is likely to hurt the wallets of the poor and vulnerable in the region. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cast a shadow. As the latest variant sweeps over the region, countries grapple with a host of problems depending on initial conditions and policy priorities. The region, like the rest of the world, is not out of the woods yet. Vaccinations remain the effective path out of the pandemic, leading to lower hospitalizations and death rates. Testing helps curb the spread. During times of uncertainty, it is important to not be overconfident about the region’s growth prospects. Growth forecasts serve as a significant signpost for policymakers to chart a path forward. Over the last decade, growth forecasts in the MENA region have often been inaccurate and overly optimistic, which can lead to economic contractions down the road due to ebullient borrowing. There is considerable room for the region to improve its forecasts that are largely hindered by opaque data systems, growth volatility and conflict. The MENA region lags considerably in the timely production of credible statistics. A key finding of the report is that the best way to improve forecasters is to provide forecasters with as much good quality information as possible. -
Publication
Impact of U.S. Market Access on Local Labor Markets in Vietnam
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03)This paper examines the impact of U.S. market access on local labor markets in a developing country, Vietnam. The study finds that following the implementation of the Vietnam–United States bilateral trade agreement in December 2001, manufacturing employment increased in provinces that were more exposed to U.S. tariff cuts. In those provinces, employment also increased in many service sectors, reflecting strong spillovers of job gains. The new job opportunities have attracted labor from agriculture, thus reducing agricultural employment. The paper examines three possible channels of job gain spillovers, namely, demand, production, and real estate. Although there is evidence for all three channels, the demand channel is the most important. -
Publication
Resource Misallocation and Productivity Gaps in Malaysia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03)The reallocation of resources from low- to high-productivity firms can generate large aggregate productivity gains. The paper uses data from the Malaysian manufacturing census to measure the country's hypothetical productivity gains when moving toward the level of within-sector allocative efficiency in the United States to be between 13 and 36 percent. Across three census periods in 2000, 2005, and 2010 (the most recent available), the productivity gaps appear to have somewhat widened. This suggests that the "catching-up" process remains a challenge and a potential opportunity, particularly if total factor productivity is expected to be the dominant source of future economic growth. The simulations, based on different magnitudes of the realization of hypothetical productivity gains, show that Malaysia's gross domestic product growth can potentially increase by 0.4 to 1.3 percentage points per year over five years. The analysis accounts only for resource misallocation within sectors. There may be other, possibly large, resource misallocation across sectors. If so, closing those gaps could boost total factor productivity and gross domestic product growth even further. -
Publication
Courts and Business Registration: Evidence from Serbia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10)This paper studies the effects of a reform in Serbia that transferred business registration from regional courts to a centralized agency. Using administrative data, the analysis employs a difference-in-difference strategy that compares new firms before and after the reform across districts based on the level of distrust in regional courts. The results suggest that the reform increased the number of new firms more in regions with higher initial levels of distrust, by up to 34 percent. The reform also increased the survival rates of new firms. These effects are large compared to those of other types of registration reforms, suggesting that courts can pose significant barriers to new firm creation. -
Publication
On the Allocation of Resources in Developing East Asia and Pacific
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10)Over the past decades, East Asia and Pacific's productivity has been gradually catching up with the frontier (the United States), with China leading the pack. Productivity growth has been driven by sustained within-sector productivity growth. Reallocation of labor to sectors with higher productivity, such as industry and services, also contributed to productivity improvements. Nevertheless, resource misallocation remains. Firm-level evidence from four East Asia and Pacific countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam) suggests that resource misallocation across firms within a sector is large, albeit declining over time. Private domestic firms and firms with higher productivity face larger distortions. -
Publication
The Long-Run and Gender-Equalizing Impacts of School Access: Evidence from the First Indochina War
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06)Very few studies currently exist on the long-term impacts of schooling policies in developing countries. This paper examines the impacts -- half a century later -- of a mass education program conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the occupied areas during the First Indochina War. Difference-in-difference estimation results suggest that school-age children who were exposed to the program obtained significantly higher levels of education than their peers who were residing in French-occupied areas. The impacts are statistically significant for school-age girls and not for school-age boys. The analysis finds beneficial spillover and inter-generational impacts of education: affected girls enjoyed higher household living standards, had more educated spouses, and raised more educated children. The paper discusses various robustness checks and extensions that support these findings. -
Publication
Contagious Protests
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07)This paper explores the spillover of protests across countries using data on nonviolent and spontaneous demonstrations for 200 countries from 2000 to 2020. Using an autoregressive spatial model, the analysis finds strong evidence of "contagious protests," with a catalyzing role of social media. In particular, social media penetration in the source and destination of protests leads to protest spillovers between countries. There is evidence of parallel learning between streets of nations alongside the already documented learning between governments. -
Publication
Employment Multipliers over the Business Cycle
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06)This paper estimates dynamic employment multipliers in a U.S. county during 1998-2015. On average, one exogenous tradable job gain creates 1.1 jobs in the rest of the county economy in the same year, but is offset by losses of 0.23 job one year later and 0.32 job two years later. The multiplier is modest during the 2002-2007 boom and is large during the Great Recession. It is smaller in the initial years of the Recovery but is larger in the latter years. Uncertainty and credit constraints are two possible hindrances to the propagation of job gains during the Recovery. -
Publication
Reform Chatter and Democracy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07)This paper explores the dynamics of media chatter about economic reforms using text analysis from about a billion newspaper articles in 28 languages. The paper shows that the intensity of reform chatter increases during economic downturns. This increase is more significant in democracies. Using instrumental variable techniques, the analysis finds the relationship to be causal. The paper also documents that reform chatter is followed by actual reforms, suggesting that democracies benefit from a "self-correcting" mechanism stemming from changing popular attitudes toward reform. -
Publication
Does the Minimum Wage Affect Employment? Evidence from the Manufacturing Sector in Indonesia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-07)Using survey data from the Indonesian manufacturing industry, this paper investigates the impact of minimum wage on employment and wages offered by Indonesian manufacturing firms from 1993 to 2006. It shows that the estimated effects of minimum wage on employment are positive within a province (i.e., with province fixed effects), but negative within a firm (i.e., with firm fixed effects), indicating the importance of using firm panel data to reduce the endogeneity bias in estimates. It finds significant heterogeneous effects of minimum-wage changes on employment. The employment effects of minimum wages are significant and negative among small firms and less educated workers, but not among large firms and workers with high school education and above. The negative employment impact is more severe for non-production workers than for production workers. The analysis also shows that the minimum wage disproportionally affects women: most of the non-production job losses are experienced by female workers. Lastly, the paper finds that the minimum wage is more correlated with the average wage of small firms than that of large firms, suggesting that minimum wages are more binding in small firms.