Person:
Onder, Harun

Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Forced displacement, International trade policy, Demographic transitions, Economics of conflict

ORCID

0000-0002-0491-688X

External Links

Google
RePEc

Departments

Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, World Bank

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

Harun Onder is a Senior Economist at the World Bank. His work focuses on the economics of conflict and forced displacement, international trade policy, economic implications of demographic transitions, and challenges faced by natural resource-rich economies. He has provided analysis, training, and technical assistance to many governments in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Harun was the lead author of World Bank flagship reports “The Mobility Displaced Syrians”, “The Toll of War”, and “The Economics of Hosting Refugees”. His technical work has been published in leading academic journals including the Journal of International Economics and the Journal of Development Economics, and his contributions have been widely featured in media outlets including BBC, CNN, NPR, The Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Harun received Executive Education in development policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and he holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Florida International University.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 18

Growth and Volatility Analysis Using Wavelets

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-08) Maslova, Inga ; Onder, Harun ; Sanghi, Apurva

The magnitude and persistence of growth in gross domestic product are topics of intense scrutiny by economists. Although the existing techniques provide a range of tools to study the nature of growth and volatility time series, these usually come with shortcomings, including the need to arbitrarily define acceleration spells, and focus on a particular frequency at a time. This paper explores the application of "wavelet-based" techniques to study the time-varying nature of growth and volatility. These techniques lend themselves to a more robust analysis of short-term and long-term determinants of growth and volatility than the traditional decomposition techniques, as demonstrated on a small sample of countries. In addition to having desirable technical advantages, such as localization in time and frequency and the ability to work with non-stationary series, these techniques also make it possible to accurately decompose the association between growth trajectories of different countries over different time horizons. Such "co-movement" analysis can provide policy makers with important insights on regional integration, growth poles, and how short and long term developments in other countries affect their domestic economy.
Macroeconomic and Fiscal Implications of Population Aging in Bulgaria

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-02) Onder, Harun ; Pestieau, Pierre ; Ley, Eduardo

Bulgaria is in the midst of a serious demographic transition that will shrink its population at one of the highest rates in the world within the next few decades. This study analyzes the macroeconomic and fiscal implications of this demographic transition by using a long-term model, which integrates the demographic projections with social security, fiscal and real economy dimensions in a consistent manner. The simulations suggest that, even under fairly optimistic assumptions, Bulgaria's demographic transition will exert significant fiscal pressures and depress the economic growth in the medium and long term. However, the results also demonstrate that the Government of Bulgaria can play a significant role in mitigating some of these effects. Policies that induce higher labor force participation, promote productivity and technological improvement, and provide better education outcomes are found to counteract the negative consequences of the demographic shift.
Punjab Debt Sustainability Analysis

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-10) Manoel, Alvaro ; Refaqat, Saadia ; Onder, Harun ; Ashraf, Mehwish

Punjab is Pakistan's most populous and economically vibrant province. Its fiscal health, therefore, is crucial to the fiscal stability and economic development of Pakistan as a whole. By end-June 2011, Punjab's outstanding debt stood at Rs. 413 billion, or 4.0 percent of Gross Subnational Domestic Product (GSDP). The low debt level is perhaps not surprising given the historical barriers to borrowing imposed at the federal level. But this has changed profoundly with enactment of the 18th Constitutional Amendment which has allowed provinces to borrow domestically and externally, subject to limits imposed by National Economic Council (NEC). This change has heightened the need to examine what Punjab owes and the question of provincial debt sustainability in general. As there is no threshold defined for subnational debt levels, this sustainability analysis considers unsustainable fiscal policies and borrowing strategy to be those that lead to an explosive accumulation of debt such that it would jeopardize the normal provision of services by the province. The analysis projects the debt outlook through the fiscal years 2012 to 2021, using the Government of Punjab's current Medium-Term Fiscal Framework (MTFF) as the base. The MTFF for fiscal 2012 anticipates fiscal surpluses in medium term, driven mainly by an improvement in provincial finances due to a favorable Seventh National Finance Commission Award, and thus concludes that the debt outlook is sustainable through fiscal 2021: the debt-to-GSDP ratio gradually declines over the next 10 years, to 1.2 percent, from 4.0 percent; the interest payments-to-revenues ratio decreases to 0.9 percent, from 3.0 percent; while the debt service-to-revenues ratio rises by a modest 0.3 percent to 3.3 percent. The analysis then explores some potential vulnerability to economic and fiscal shocks. Punjab's debt sustainability to be fairly robust to most shocks, except when the individual shocks are combined. However, the probability of combined shock remains very low.
Azerbaijan : Inclusive Growth in a Resource-Rich Economy

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013) Onder, Harun

Azerbaijan experienced a 'golden age' in the last decade, during which the average growth rate reached record high levels and poverty decreased significantly. On average, the economy grew by 15.3 percent per year in real terms during this period, mainly driven by the oil sector (21.5 percent growth per year), but with a significant contribution from the non-oil sector (11.1 percent per year). As a result, poverty declined dramatically from 49.6 percent in 2001 to 15.8 percent in 2008 the latest year for which household survey data was available when this report was prepared. This report takes an inclusive growth approach to investigating the ways in which the country's high growth was translated into significant poverty reduction. First chapter summarizes the sources of growth in Azerbaijan with an emphasis on structural transformation and discusses highlights of the inclusive growth methodology. Second chapter explores how growth helped to reduce poverty. Third chapter analyzes the sustainability and inclusiveness of the recent growth. Finally, fourth chapter focuses on the structural obstacles that constrain further inclusive growth in Azerbaijan. The last chapter recommends some policies to overcome these obstacles. The main findings of this report call for a careful strategy in promoting further inclusive growth in Azerbaijan. The mechanisms that facilitated drastic reductions in poverty in the last decade a strong rise in fiscal transfers and in the real wage were made possible by the oil boom. However, these mechanisms also reduced the pace of structural transformation in the Azerbaijan economy. Distorted incentives in demand and supply sides of the labor market have seemed to weaken the correlation between productivity growth and employment shares. This report finds that the failure to follow a fiscal rule over the past decade has led to excessive domestic absorption with a resulting barriers against further development and diversification in the tradable sectors (principally agriculture and manufacturing) and against employment creation within those sectors, as well as leading to an unsustainable growth in public expenditures, and to inadequate long-term public savings in the Oil Fund. Thus, the reassertion of a fiscal rule that constrains domestic absorption and promotes economic diversification is a necessary condition for achieving sustained inclusive growth.
Services, Inequality, and the Dutch Disease

(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-07) Battaile, Bill ; Chisik, Richard ; Onder, Harun

This paper shows how Dutch disease effects may arise solely from a shift in demand following a natural resource discovery. The natural resource wealth increases the demand for non-tradable luxury services due to non-homothetic preferences. Labor that could be used to develop other non-resource tradable sectors is pulled into these service sectors. As a result, manufactures and other tradable goods are more likely to be imported, and learning and productivity improvements accrue to the foreign exporters. However, once the natural resources diminish, there is less income to purchase the services and non-resource tradable goods. Thus, the temporary gain in purchasing power translates into long-term stagnation. As opposed to conventional models where income distribution has no effect on economic outcomes, an unequal distribution of the rents from resource wealth further intensifies the Dutch disease dynamics within this framework.
Incomplete Integration and Contagion of Debt Distress in Economic Unions

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-12) Karayalcin, Cem ; Onder, Harun

This paper compares different fiscal integration schemes on the basis of their ability to finance public investments and resilience to debt distress and contagion. Complete integration schemes, where a central authority chooses the level of public investments with productivity-enhancing externalities across different jurisdictions, are shown to be superior to incomplete integration schemes, where member governments choose public investments unilaterally. As a result, equilibrium income is greater for citizens of member states under a complete integration scheme. Moreover, complete integration schemes are shown to be more resilient to idiosyncratic shocks and more effective in limiting contagion of debt distress. This is mainly because the central authority can credibly borrow more without risking default than member states taken together can and it can "transfer resilience" across them if needed. These findings inform discussions on structural aspects of secular stagnation in Europe by emphasizing a potential challenge in the institutional design of fiscal responsibilities.
Aging, Social Security Design, and Capital Accumulation

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-09) Dedry, Antoine ; Onder, Harun ; Pestieau, Pierre

This paper analyzes the impact of aging on capital accumulation and welfare in a country with a sizable unfunded social security system. Using a two-period overlapping generation model with endogenous retirement decisions, the paper shows that the type of aging and the type of unfunded social security system are important in understanding this impact. The analysis compares two types of demographic changes, declining fertility and increasing longevity; three types of pensions, defined contributions, defined benefits, and defined annuities; as well as mandatory and optimal retirement systems to investigate the differences in implications of aging.
Fiscal Policy Issues in the Aging Societies

( 2015-03) Bogetic, Zeljko ; Onder, Harun ; Onal, Anil ; Skrok, Emilia ; Schwartz, Anita ; Winkler, Hernan

Aging may be one of the most far-reaching processes defining the economic, fiscal, and social changes societies are likely to experience over the next 40 years. The demographic consequences of aging will have a dramatic impact on labor markets, economic growth, social structures--and government budgets. These issues have gained urgency after the second largest global recession in the past 100 years. Based on a broad comparative analysis of countries that include the EU and non-EU European and Central Asian countries, as well as several case studies and model simulations, the paper seeks to provide broad answers--tailored in part to distinct groups of countries according to their aging-fiscal profiles--to major questions facing governments budgets in aging societies: What are the fiscal-aging profiles of Western European, emerging European, and Central Asian countries? In other words, how good or bad is their fiscal situation--"initial conditions"--in view of their emerging aging-related problems? What kind of public spending pressures are likely to emerge in the coming decades, and what will be their relative importance? How do countries compare in terms of the possible impacts of aging on growth and long-term debt sustainability? What can be learned from in-depth and comparative case studies of aging, fiscal sustainability, and fiscal reform? Are there good-practice examples--countries doing things right at the right time--that may offer lessons for the others? And, perhaps most important, given the need for long-term fiscal consolidation for many countries, what kind of revenue and expenditure policy agendas are likely to emerge to mitigate the effects of aging? A key policy conclusion is that countries should aim for early rather than delayed reforms dealing with long-term aging pressures. The urgency is accentuated by the debt situations and/or adverse debt and demographic dynamics in almost all countries but also by the evolving voter preferences. As societies age and voting preferences increasingly reflect the political will of the older population, it will become more difficult to enact the necessary reforms ensuring social and fiscal sustainability.
Inherited Wealth and Demographic Aging

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06) Onder, Harun ; Pestieau, Pierre

The role of inherited wealth in modern economies has increasingly come under scrutiny. This study presents one of the first attempts to shed light on how demographic aging could shape this role. It shows that, in the absence of retirement annuities, or for a given level of annuitization, both increasing longevity and decreasing fertility should reduce the inherited share of total wealth in a given economy. Thus, aging is not likely to explain a recent surge in this share in some advanced economies. Shrinking retirement annuities, however, could offset and potentially reverse these effects. The paper also shows that aging could increase the size of individual bequests vis-à-vis real wages. However, these bequests will be more unequally distributed if aging is driven by a drop in fertility. In comparison, the effect of increasing longevity on their distribution in non-monotonic.
Aging, Trade, and Migration

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06) Chisik, Richard ; Onder, Harun ; Qirjo, Dhimitri

This study considers the role of demand-driven changes arising from population aging and how they affect the pattern of international trade as well as trade and immigration policy. An aging society can see a welfare-reducing reduction in its share of manufacturing output and this reduction is magnified by a decrease in trade costs (an increase in globalization). Immigration can ameliorate this outcome if it is directed toward younger immigrants. A unilateral tariff increase can also reduce firm delocation from an aging country, however, a reciprocated tariff increase will unambiguously harm the country with the older average population.