Krishnan, Nandini

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Krishnan, Nandini

Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

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Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

Last updated: June 11, 2025

Biography

Nandini Krishnan is a Senior Economist with the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. She leads the GP’s program in Afghanistan, and its analytical program on Cox’s Bazar/Rohingya influx in Bangladesh. She has worked on many fragile and conflict affected states (including Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian territories), and co-led analytical programs focusing on refugee hosting situations. She has supported impact evaluations of large-scale projects and programs in Tanzania, Nigeria, and South Africa, and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 21

June 2025 Update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP)
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-11) Alfani, Federica; Aaron, Danielle V.; Atamanov, Aziz; Aguilar, R.Andres Castaneda; Diaz-Bonilla, Carolina; Devpura, Nancy P.; Dewina, Reno; Finn, Arden; Fujs, Tony; Gonzalez, Maria Fernanda; Krishnan, Nandini; Kochhar, Nishtha; Kumar, Naresh; Lakner, Christoph; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lestani, Diego; Liniado, Julia; Lønborg, Jonas; Mahler, Daniel G.; Mejía-Mantilla, Carolina; Montalva, Veronica; Herrera, Laura L.; Nguyen, Minh C.; Rubiano, Eliana; Sajaia, Zurab; Castro, Diana M.; Seshan, Ganesh K.; Tetteh-Baah, Samuel K.; Mendoza, Martha C. Viveros; Wu, Haoyu; Yonzan, Nishant; Wambile, Ayago
The June 2025 update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) introduces several important changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. The most important change is the adoption of the 2021 Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs). In addition, new data for India has been incorporated and the existing series adjusted for comparability. This document details the changes to underlying data and the methodological reasons behind them. Depending on the availability of recent survey data, global and regional poverty estimates are reported up to 2023, together with nowcasts up to 2025. The PIP database now includes 74 new country-years, bringing the total number of surveys to over 2,400, for 172 economies.
A Method to Scale-Up Interpretative Qualitative Analysis, with an Application to Aspirations in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) Ashwin, ,Julian; Rao, Vijayendra; Biradavolu, Monica; Chhabra, Aditya; Haque, Arshia; Krishnan, Nandini; Khan, Afsana
The qualitative analysis of open-ended interviews has vast potential in economics but has found limited use. This is partly because the interpretative, nuanced human reading of text and coding that it requires is labor intensive and very time consuming. This paper presents a method to simplify and shorten the coding process by extending a small set of interpretative human-codes to a larger, representative, sample using natural language processing and thus analyze qualitative data at scale. It applies it to analyze 2,200 open-ended interviews on parent’s aspirations for children with Rohingya refugees and their Bangladeshi hosts. It shows that studying aspirations with open-ended interviews extends the economics focus on material goals to ideas from philosophy and anthropology that emphasize aspirations for moral and religious values, and the navigational capacity to achieve these aspirations. The paper shows how to assess the robustness and reliability of this approach and finds that extending the sample of interviews, rather than the human-coded training set, is likely to be optimal.
Fragility and Conflict: On the Front Lines of the Fight against Poverty
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-02-27) Corral, Paul; Irwin, Alexander; Krishnan, Nandini; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Vishwanath, Tara
Fragility and conflict pose a critical threat to the global goal of ending extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2015, successful development strategies reduced the proportion of the world’s people living in extreme poverty from 36 to 10 percent. But in many fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), poverty is stagnating or getting worse. The number of people living in proximity to conflict has nearly doubled worldwide since 2007. In the Middle East and North Africa, one in five people now lives in such conditions. The number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide has also more than doubled in the same period, exceeding 70 million in 2017. If current trends continue, by the end of 2020, the number of extremely poor people living in economies affected by fragility and conflict will exceed the number of poor people in all other settings combined. This book shows why addressing fragility and conflict is vital for poverty goals and charts directions for action. It presents new estimates of welfare in FCS, filling gaps in previous knowledge, and analyzes the multidimensional nature of poverty in these settings. It shows that data deprivation in FCS has prevented an accurate global picture of fragility, poverty, and their interactions, and it explains how innovative new measurement strategies are tackling these challenges. The book discusses the long-term consequences of conflict and introduces a data-driven classification of countries by fragility profile, showing opportunities for tailored policy interventions and the need for monitoring multiple markers of fragility. The book strengthens understanding of what poverty reduction in FCS will require and what it can achieve.
Losing Livelihoods: The Labor Market Impacts of COVID-19 in Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09-15) Khan, Afsana Iffat; Genoni, Maria Eugenia; Palaniswamy, Nethra; Krishnan, Nandini; Raza, Wameq
This paper provides early insights into the labor market impacts of the ongoing Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) crisis in Bangladesh, with a special focus on three especially vulnerable areas: poor areas in Dhaka and Chittagong City Corporations and Cox’s Bazar district. The authors build on household surveys collected before the crisis and phone monitoring surveys collected after the start of the crisis to shed light on the implications of COVID-19 for employment and earnings. The findings presented indicate substantial labor market impacts both at the extensive and intensive margin, with important variation across areas and gender, largely due to the nature of occupations affected by the crisis. The findings also point to substantial uncertainty about job prospects.
More Is Better: Evaluating the Impact of a Variation in Cash Assistance on the Reintegration Outcomes of Returning Afghan Refugees
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01) Esper, Hisham; Krishnan, Nandini; Wieser, Christina
This paper studies the effect of a change in the amount of cash assistance provided to Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan on household outcomes post-return. Using a regression discontinuity design, it measures the impact of a large exogenous change in cash assistance amounts on post-return outcomes in a quasi-experimental setting. Administrative data and post-return monitoring data suggest that more than 16 months after their return, returnees who received a larger cash allowance of $350 per returnee—equivalent to 2.5 times the average annual pre-return annual income—were better off than those who received a smaller cash allowance of $150. Recipients of the $350 cash assistance were more likely to invest in durable assets, such as a house (17 percentage point difference); recipients of the $150 cash allowance were more likely to use the assistance for immediate food consumption needs (40 percentage point difference). Households that received $350 per returnee were significantly more likely to have been issued legal documentation for their household members. In line with the literature on cash assistance, the change in cash assistance had no effect on post-return employment outcomes. The findings provide new evidence on the effects of unconditional cash transfers on refugee reintegration and show that larger cash transfer programs can have a large and long-term impact following refugees’ return.
The Insights and Illusions of Consumption Measurements
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05) Battistin, Erich; De Nadai, Michele; Krishnan, Nandini
Although household well-being is anchored in long-term average rates of consumption, welfare comparisons typically rely on shorter-duration survey measurements. This paper develops a new strategy to identify the distribution of these long-term rates by leveraging a large-scale randomization that elicited repeated short-duration measurements from diaries and recall questions. Identification stems from diary-recall differences in reports from the same household, does not require these reports to be error-free, and hinges on a research design with broad replicability. This strategy delivers cost-effective suggestions for designing survey modules to yield the most accurate measurements of consumption well-being, and offers new insights for interpreting and reconciling diary-recall differences in household expenditure surveys.
The Lives and Livelihoods of Syrian Refugees in the Middle East: Evidence from the 2015-16 Surveys of Syrian Refugees and Host Communities in Jordan, Lebanon, and Kurdistan, Iraq
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) Russo Riva, Flavio; Krishnan, Nandini; Sharma, Dhiraj; Vishwanath, Tara
The Syrian crisis has led to rapid and large-scale population displacement. This paper has two main aims. (i) It documents the size and timing of the Syrian refugee influx into Jordan, Lebanon, and Kurdistan, characterizing the forced nature of displacement and exploring factors that influenced the decision to flee and subsequently move within the host country. (ii) The paper describes the daily living conditions of refugees after displacement, documenting vulnerability along several dimensions, such as housing access and quality, labor market attachment, and financial security. The data sources include the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' registration database and multi-country, multi-topic surveys conducted in 2015-16.
Coping with the Influx: Service Delivery to Syrian Refugees and Hosts in Jordan, Lebanon, and Kurdistan, Iraq
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) Russo Riva, Flavio; Krishnan, Nandini; Sharma, Dhiraj; Vishwanath, Tara
The Syrian crisis has led to rapid and large-scale population displacement. This paper uses several sources of data, including the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees' registration database and multi-country, multi-topic surveys collected in 2015-16, to characterize service delivery in the context of a rapid influx of displaced populations. The study encompasses infrastructure services, such as electricity and garbage disposal, and social services, such as health and education, and considers both measures of access to services and their perceived quality.
Estimating the Welfare Costs of Reforming the Iraq Public Distribution System: A Mixed Demand Approach
(Taylor and Francis, 2019-12-06) Ramadan, Racha; Krishnan, Nandini; Olivieri, Sergio
Through three decades of conflict, food rations delivered through the public distribution system (PDS) have remained the largest safety net among Iraq’s population. Reforming the PDS continues to be politically challenging, notwithstanding the system’s import dependence, economic distortions, and unsustainable fiscal burden. The oil price decline of mid-2014 and recent efforts to rebuild and recover have put PDS reform back on the agenda. The government needs to find an effective way to deliver broad benefits from a narrow economic base reliant on oil. The study described here adopts a mixed demand approach to analyzing household consumption patterns for the purpose of assessing plausible reform scenarios and estimating the direction and scale of the associated welfare costs and transfers. It finds that household consumption of PDS items is relatively inelastic to changes in price, particularly among the poor. The results suggest that any one-shot reform will have sizeable adverse welfare impacts and will need to be preceded by a well-targeted compensation mechanism. To keep welfare constant, subsidy removal in urban areas, for example, would require the poorest and richest households to be compensated for, respectively, 74 per cent and nearly 40 per cent of their PDS expenditures.
Afghanistan’s Displaced People: A Socio-Economic Profile, 2013-2014
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08-03) Yde-Jensen, Thea; Krishnan, Nandini; Tan, Xiayun; Wieser, Christina
Afghans represent the world’s largest protracted refugee population, and one of the largest populations to be repatriated to their country of origin in this century. Between 2002 and 2016, over six million refugees returned to Afghanistan from neighboring countries. In 2016 alone, returnees numbered more than a million. In an already difficult context, large-scale internal displacement and return from outside have strained the delivery of public services in Afghanistan and increased competition for scarce economic opportunities, not only for the displaced, but for the population at large. This note aims at contributing to our understanding of displacement in Afghanistan by comparing the socioeconomic profiles of three populations: (i) former refugees who returned to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014 (“pre-2015 returnees”); (ii) internally displaced persons (“IDPs”); and (iii) non-displaced persons (“hosts”). The note captures and compares these groups’ situations at a specific time-point, using data from the 2013-14 Afghanistan Living Conditions Survey (ALCS). Importantly, the results document socioeconomic conditions just prior to the transfer of security responsibilities from international troops to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) in 2014, which was associated with a subsequent decline in aid, both security and civilian, and a sharp drop in economic activity. The results presented here cover the largest return of Afghans to the county following the fall of the Taliban in 2002, but precede the more recent large-scale return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan in 2016-17. Future publications will extend the findings summarized here with analysis of new and existing data covering this recent influx. This research is part of an ongoing effort to document population displacement challenges and solutions in Afghanistan over time. Data from ALCS 2013-14 establish baseline socio-economic profiles for returned refugees, IDPs, and non-displaced hosts. Further research and analysis now in progress will document how these conditions have changed since 2013-14, and will distill evidence for policy to improve socio-economic outcomes among Afghanistan’s displaced and non-displaced people.