Ravallion, Martin

Person:
Ravallion, Martin

Development Research Group, World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Welfare Economics; Public Economics; Economics of Poverty; Economics of Inequality

External Links

Let's talk Development

Departments

Development Research Group, World Bank

Last updated: January 8, 2025

Biography

Martin Ravallion is Acting Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, a position he has held since June 2012. Prior to that he was Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank—the Bank’s research department. He has held various positions in the Bank since he joined as an Economist in 1988 and he has worked across multiple sectors and in all Bank regions. Prior to joining the Bank, Martin was on the faculty of the Australian National University (ANU). He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics (LSE), and has taught economics at LSE, Oxford University, the Australian National University, Princeton University and the Paris School of Economics. Martin’s main research interests over the last 25 years have concerned poverty and policies for fighting it. He is well-known for his work on measuring global poverty and for his work linking economic policies to the welfare of poor people, including the evaluation of anti-poverty programs. He has advised numerous governments and international agencies on these topics, and he has written extensively on them, including four books and over 200 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. Martin currently serves on the Editorial Boards of ten economics journals, is a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development and a Founding Council Member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality. In 2011 he received the John Kenneth Galbraith Award of America’s Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 145

Migrants as Social Protection?: Simulations of a Market for Work Permits
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-08) Do, Quy-Toan; Lokshin, Michael M.; Ravallion, Martin
Workers have the right to take up any job offer in their country of citizenship but not to rent out that right. This paper shows that relaxing this restriction using a two-sided competitive market in work permits can provide a basic income guarantee for workers in migration-destination countries, financed by selling temporary work permits to migrant workers. Regulating the market by imposing a tax on work permits narrows the set of beneficiaries, the income of which can further be complemented with the revenues from such tax. Substantial gains in the destination countries’ gross domestic product can be expected, alongside the first-order gains to migrant workers who would not otherwise have access to the labor markets in destination countries. The paper provides a quantitative illustration by simulating a fictitious market for work permits between Mexico and the United States.
Is Social Protection a Luxury Good?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09) Lokshin, Michael; Ravallion, Martin; Torre, Iván
The claim that social protection is a luxury good—with a national income elasticity exceeding unity—has been influential. The paper tests the “luxury good hypothesis” using newly-assembled data on social protection spending across countries since 1995, treating the pandemic period separately, as it entailed a large expansion in social protection efforts. While the mean income share devoted to social protection rises with income, this is attributable to multiple confounders, including relative prices, weak governance in low-income countries and access to information-communication technologies. Controlling for these, social protection is not a luxury good. This was also true during the pandemic.
Would Mexican Migrants be Willing to Guarantee Americans a Basic Income?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Lokshin, Michael; Ravallion, Martin
The paper simulates a double-sided competitive market in temporary work permits between the U.S. and Mexico. Eligible working-age Americans would have the option of renting out their implicit work permits while Mexican workers have remunerative new opportunities. With plausible allowances for migration costs, the market can support a self-financed and self-targeted basic income for Americans and lower their poverty rate. With sufficiently high tax rates on work permits, the scheme can be managed to avoid a large increase in the count of total migrants compared to now. The likely change in the skill composition of migrants would raise U.S. GDP.
Scarred but Wiser: World War 2's COVID Legacy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11) Kolchin, Vladimir; Lokshin, Michael; Ravallion, Martin
The paper formalizes and tests the hypothesis that greater exposure to big shocks induces stronger societal responses for adaptation and protection from future big shocks. Support for this hypothesis is found in various strands of the literature and in new empirical tests using cross-country data on deaths due to COVID-19 and deaths during World War 2. Countries with higher death rates in the war saw lower death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tests are robust to a wide range of model specifications and alternative assumptions.
The Missing Market for Work Permits
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09) Lokshin, Michael; Ravallion, Martin
Citizens have a right to accept any job offer in their country, but that right is not marketable or automatically extended to foreigners. Yet, some citizens have useful things to do if they could rent out their right-to-work, and there are foreigners who would value the new options for employment. Thus, there is a missing market. A solution is to allow people to rent out their right-to-work for a period of their choice. On the other side of the market, foreigners could purchase time-bound work permits. The market would no longer be missing. This paper formulates and studies this policy proposal.
Welfare-Consistent Global Poverty Measures
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-08) Ravallion, Martin; Chen, Shaohua
The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below by a fixed absolute line and above by weakly-relative lines derived from a theoretical model of relative-income comparisons calibrated to data on national poverty lines. Both bounds indicate falling global poverty incidence, but more slowly for the upper bound. Either way, the developing world has a higher poverty incidence but is making more progress against poverty than the developed world.
Are Poor Individuals Mainly Found in Poor Households?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-03) Brown, Caitlin; Ravallion, Martin; van de Walle, Dominique
Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. This paper questions this assumption, using nutritional status as a proxy for individual poverty. The comprehensive assessment for Sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and children are spread widely across the distribution of household wealth and consumption. Roughly three-quarters of underweight women and undernourished children are not found in the poorest 20 percent of households, and around half are not found in the poorest 40 percent. The mean joint probability of being an underweight woman and living in the poorest wealth quintile is only 0.03. Countries with higher overall rates of undernutrition tend to have a higher share of undernourished individuals in nonpoor households. The results are consistent with evidence of substantial intrahousehold inequality.
Long-term Gains from Electrification in Rural India
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2017-06-01) van de Walle, Dominique; Ravallion, Martin; Mendiratta, Vibhuti; Koolwal, Gayatri
We know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a 17-year period, allowing for both internal and external (village-level) effects. Under our identifying assumptions, electrification brought significant consumption gains for households who acquired electricity for their own use. We also find evidence of a dynamic effect of village connectivity for households without electricity themselves. This is suggestive of an external effect, which also comes with a shift in consumption spending suggestive of status concerns among those still without electricity. Labor earnings were an important channel of impact. This was mainly through extra work by men. There was no effect on average wage rates.
For India's Rural Poor, Growing Towns Matter More than Growing Cities
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-03) Gibson, John; Datt, Gaurav; Murgai, Rinku; Ravallion, Martin
It is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of India's secondary towns or big cities mattered more to recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data deficiencies have made this a difficult question to answer previously. Satellite observations of night lights are used to measure urban growth on the extensive and intensive margins in the context of a spatial Durbin fixed-effects model of poverty measures for rural India, calibrated to a panel of 59 regions observed four times over 1993-2012. The expansion of lit area had greater effect on the rural poverty measures than did intensive margin growth in the brightness of light from urban areas. For India's current stage of development, growth of secondary towns may do more to reduce rural poverty than big city growth, although the theoretical model suggests that cities may eventually take over from towns as the drivers of rural poverty reduction.
Growth, Urbanization, and Poverty Reduction in India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-02) Datt, Gaurav; Ravallion, Martin; Murgai, Rinku
Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991. The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991, despite rising inequality. Faster poverty decline came with higher growth and a more pro-poor pattern of growth. Post-1991 data suggest stronger inter-sectoral linkages: urban consumption growth brought gains to the rural as well as the urban poor, and the primary-secondary-tertiary composition of growth has ceased to matter, as all three sectors contributed to poverty reduction.