Tiwari, Sailesh

Person:
Tiwari, Sailesh

Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

Author Name Variants

Tiwari, S.

Fields of Specialization

Applied microeconomics, Development economics, Labor economics, Poverty and Inequality

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Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

Last updated: September 4, 2024

Biography

Sailesh Tiwari is a Senior Economist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank. He is currently based in Jakarta where he leads and coordinates the country work program on poverty and inequality in Indonesia. Prior to joining the Indonesia office, he led the World Bank poverty engagements in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Yemen and Nepal. His work at the World Bank has focused on diagnostic and policy research at the nexus between growth, poverty and inequality, particularly inequality of opportunity, economic and social mobility and labor markets. He is co-author of Uneven Odds, Unequal Outcomes: Inequality of Opportunity in the Middle East and North Africa and From Reformer to Performer: A Systematic Country Diagnostic for Georgia. A native of Nepal, Sailesh holds a PhD in Economics from Brown University, an MSc. in Financial Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Economics from Connecticut College.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 23

How Redistributive Is Fiscal Policy in China? New Evidence on the Distributional Impacts of Taxes and Spending
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-04) Lugo, Maria Ana; Lustig, Nora; Montalva Talledo, Veronica Sonia; Tiwari, Sailesh; Wang, Yang
How redistributive are fiscal policies in China This paper applies the standard fiscal incidence analysis to data from the China Family Panel Study 2018 to study the effect of government taxes and spending on inequality in China. The analysis includes fiscal elements, such as personal income tax, contributions to social insurance, value-added tax, consumption tax, cash transfers, contributory pensions, and spending on education and health, and accounts for 63 percent of total revenues and 43 percent of total government spending. Consistent with previous studies, the paper finds that fiscal policy in China continues to redistribute quite effectively, achieving inequality reduction of about 10.3 Gini points, placing China around the median of upper-middle-income country peers on the level of redistribution achieved by fiscal policy. Not unlike several other countries where similar analysis has been done, most of the inequality reduction achieved by China is through education and health spending. Findings from the paper further suggest that while the fiscal system delivers more to those who need the most support, the heavy burden of user fees—relative to disposable income—may prevent some families from accessing needed health care services and imply high costs of raising children. In addition, there is room for the progressivity of the overall package to be enhanced. In particular, the fiscal system could make a greater dent in inequality by collecting more from those who could afford to pay more and leaving more money in the pockets of those who need it the most. This could be done by increasing the share of fiscal revenues collected through progressive taxes such as personal income tax and increasing the level of cash-based social benefits (such as residents’ pensions and transfers).
Gender and Fiscal Policy — A Methodological Proposal and Its Application to Jordan and Armenia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-22) Jellema, Jon; Grown, Caren; Fuchs, Alan; Wai-Poi, Matthew; Sosa, Mariano; Tiwari, Sailesh
Fiscal policies affect households and individuals in a variety of ways. Even though these effects are likely to be different for men and women, conventional tools of fiscal incidence analysis are typically unable to capture these gender differences. Using a particular type of incidence analysis known in the literature as the Commitment to Equity framework, this paper proposes a methodology to overcome this challenge. A particular novelty the paper introduces is the explicit incorporation of social reproduction into the fiscal incidence analysis framework, enabling the implicit valuation of unpaid work that is typically undertaken by women on activities such as cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and the elderly. Applying this methodology to the cases of Jordan and Armenia — two countries with very different approaches to fiscal policy and cultural norms around the economic and social roles of men and women — the paper also highlights some of the insights that this engendered perspective could add to standard fiscal incidence analysis.
Building Public Support for Reducing Fossil Fuel Subsidies: Evidence across 12 Middle-Income Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-11-29) Hoy, Christopher; Kim, Yeon Soo; Nguyen, Minh; Sosa, Mariano; Tiwari, Sailesh
This study examines which factors influence support for reducing fossil fuel subsidies and what types of information shift people’s views through surveying 37,000 respondents across 12 middle-income countries that provided over US$750 billion in explicit and implicit subsidies for fossil fuels in 2022. Respondents were randomly allocated to receive information about the relative cost of fossil fuel subsidies, how they are regressive, or worsen climate change and air pollution. They were then asked about their support for reforms with and without accompanying policies. These treatments, particularly about environmental damage, increased support for reforms in countries that primarily subsidize gasoline and among respondents who perceive themselves to be middle class. Around 30 percent of respondents supported reducing fossil fuel subsidies in isolation, but this share increased to over 95 percent if accompanying policies were implemented. These findings help inform governments about how to build public support for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.
Time to ACT: Realizing Indonesia's Urban Potential
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-10-03) Roberts, Mark; Gil Sander, Frederico; Tiwari, Sailesh; Roberts, Mark; Gil Sander, Frederico; Tiwari, Sailesh
In over 70 years since its independence, Indonesia has been transformed by urbanization, and within the next quarter of a century, its transition to an urban society will be almost complete. While urbanization has produced considerable benefits for Indonesians, urbanization has the potential to deliver more prosperity, inclusiveness and livability. Time to ACT: Realizing Indonesia's Urban Potential explores the extent to which urbanization in Indonesia has delivered in terms of prosperity, inclusiveness, and livability, and the fundamental reforms that can help the country realize its urban potential. In doing so, the report introduces a new policy framework - the ACT framework - to guide policymaking. This framework emphasizes three policy principles - the need to Augment the provision and quality of infrastructure and basic services across urban and rural locations; the need to better Connect places and people with jobs and opportunities; and the need to Target lagging areas and marginalized groups through well-designed place-based policies, as well as thoughtful urban planning and design. Using this framework, the report provides policy recommendations differentiated by types of place, grounded in solid empirical evidence
Investing in People: Social Protection for Indonesia's 2045 Vision
(World Bank, Jakarta, 2020-04-30) Holmemo, Camilla; Acosta, Pablo; George, Tina; Palacios, Robert J.; Pinxten, Juul; Sen, Shonali; Tiwari, Sailesh
The Government of Indonesia's Vision for 2045 sets an ambitious path that will require significant investments in human capital and social protection Indonesia continues to set ambitious goals for its growth and development. The Government of Indonesia's (GoI) vision for 2045—when the country celebrates 100 years of independence—is to achieve high income status and reduce poverty to nearly zero. In addition to sustained growth and income opportunities for all, an inclusive and efficient social protection (SP) system will be essential to meet these ambitious goals. In most countries today, effective risk-sharing and SP policies play important roles in building equity, resilience and opportunity, and in strengthening human capital. Indonesia is no different. Risk sharing interventions can reduce and prevent poverty, and make growth more equitable by safeguarding households' human and physical capital. Over the past two decades, Indonesia's SP system has been fundamentally transformed. In particular, it has moved from the dominance of regressive consumer subsidies and ad-hoc crisis response to targeted and household based social assistance programs, with a massive coverage expansion. In terms of social insurance, recent years have seen an ongoing building and integration of its policies and institutions. This has all been made possible through better spending allocations and a build-up of the needed platforms to deliver programs effectively and efficiently.
Ex-ante Poverty and Distributional Impacts of COVID–19 in Indonesia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06-26) Ali, Rabia; Tiwari, Sailesh
The Government of Indonesia has responded to the pandemic strongly, instituting several economic support measures for households. Budgetary outlays on the newly announced programs amount to an approximate doubling of spending on core social assistance programs.
South Caucasus in Motion: Economic and Social Mobility in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-02) Cancho, Cesar; Tiwari, Sailesh; Meyer, Moritz; Fuchs, Alan
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of economic and social mobility in countries in the South Caucasus by complementing available household survey data in each of the countries in the subregion with other sources, such as the Life in Transition Survey (2016). The first part of the paper -- concentrated on intragenerational mobility -- finds that despite progress made in reducing poverty over the past decade, there appears to be a significant amount of churning around the poverty line. Moreover, in Georgia and Armenia, roughly one in eight individuals lived in a state of chronic poverty in 2015, and in the case of Georgia, chronic poverty is not an exclusive phenomenon for rural areas. In addition, although social programs have provided a lifeline for the chronic poor, the ability to tap into labor market opportunities has been the ticket out of poverty. The second part of the paper expands the analysis to intergenerational or social mobility. The main findings are that (1) a higher proportion of the population in this subregion considers their pre-transition family life and the lives of their parents when they were of similar age as appropriate benchmarks to evaluate their current economic situations in comparison with the other transition countries, and (2) over half of the Georgian and Armenian population disagreed with the statement that asked their views on having a better in life than their parents, aligning with the “growing but unhappy” trend that has been reported for the region.
Inequality of Opportunity in South Caucasus
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-05) Fuchs, Alan; Tiwari, Sailesh; Shidiq, Akhmad Rizal
This paper discusses equality of opportunity in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, with an emphasis on access to labor market opportunities. It develops an inequality of opportunity index on access to good jobs and decomposes the contributing factors in the prevailing inequality. Then, it discusses the extent to which inequality in accessing human capital inputs among individuals during the early formative years may affect access to good jobs. The main takeaways are as follows. First, connections play an important role in obtaining access to good jobs in the South Caucasus, highlighting the unfairness in processes in the sub-region's labor markets. Second, access to good jobs—defined as work for 20 hours or more a week and work under contract or with tenure—is low in the South Caucasus in comparison with other parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Third, even among people who have access to these jobs, the share of the total inequality of opportunity that may be characterized as unfair is relatively high. Armenia and Azerbaijan stand out for the significant share of inequality in access to good jobs associated with gender differences. Fourth, the analysis on access to education and basic human capital inputs in the earlier, formative stages of life shows that learning performance in the South Caucasus tends to be poor and unequal across the life circumstances of children. Nonetheless, the coverage rates of basic human capital inputs are generally high; the relatively narrow inequalities arise mostly from spatial disparities. These results indicate that addressing the deep structural inequalities shaping the landscape of opportunity in the South Caucasus must be a key consideration in any strategy to share prosperity sustainably.
Uneven Odds, Unequal Outcomes: Inequality of Opportunity in the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-06-23) Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Krishnan, Nandini; Narayan, Ambar; Tiwari, Sailesh; Vishwanath, Tara
Perceptions of eroding living standards and low life satisfaction are widespread in the Middle East and North Africa region today, along with pessimism about prospects for economic mobility. Conventional measures of economic well-being offer little in the way of explanation – in most countries in the region, extreme poverty is low and declining and economic inequality is lower than in other parts of the world. This book investigates possible reasons for this disconnect, focusing on the role played by inadequate and unequal access to opportunities to realize one’s aspirations for economic mobility. The inability of most countries in the region to meet the aspirations of citizens is closely linked to persistent weaknesses in the labor markets where the pace of job creation has been chronically below levels required to absorb the growing and increasingly better educated population. A high degree of segmentation in the labor markets also puts the youth and women in the region at a particular disadvantage. While labor markets are critical for mobility, opportunities and life paths can diverge even earlier in life if access to basic services in health, education and infrastructure are unequally distributed among children in their formative years. This book documents sharp disparities in the quality of services available to children of varying birth circumstances in the region. Although the most intense debates in development coalesce around inequality of income or wealth, the notion of inequality of opportunity has an intuitive appeal that can bridge ideological differences. By drawing attention to the notion of equality of opportunity to create a level playing field for all sections of society, the book highlights the need to critically examine the social contract and governance structures that guide the delivery of services and are instrumental for implementing necessary reforms to make labor markets more dynamic and equitable.
Mobility and Pathways to the Middle Class in Nepal
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-09) Shidiq, Akhmad Rizal; Tiwari, Sailesh; Balcazar, Carlos Felipe
This paper introduces a variety of concepts and methods to examine living standards improvements in Nepal in a dynamic perspective. Using data from three rounds of Nepal Living Standards Surveys conducted in the past two decades, together with data from a nationally representative survey that was implemented in 2014 specifically to collect information on social and economic mobility, the paper presents novel statistics on the extent of inter- and intra-generational mobility in Nepal. The findings suggest that there has been appreciable upward mobility in education; that is, Nepalis today are increasingly more likely to be better educated than their parents. However, inter-generational mobility of occupations has been much more muted, with 47 percent of Nepal today remaining in the same occupation as their parents. Upward mobility is higher for younger cohorts and for individuals who move from their rural areas of birth to an urban area. There are also significant differences in mobility by social groups, with Dalits and Terai caste groups having lower upward mobility odds. Examining mobility within generations using synthetic panel techniques, the paper finds that: (a) for every two people who escape poverty, one slides back, suggesting significant churning around the poverty line; (b) a large fraction of those who have escaped poverty remain vulnerable to falling back, with an overall vulnerable population of 45 percent; and (c) the share of the middle class—defined as those with sufficiently low likelihood of falling back into poverty—has increased steadily over the past two decades, reaching 22 percent in 2010–11. However, triangulating subjective well-being data from Gallup, it appears that a majority of even those who constitute the middle class are fundamentally insecure about their economic futures. The prevalence of a large vulnerable population and a nascent, growing but struggling middle class represents a key challenge to consolidating recent gains in moving people out of poverty.