Person:
Torres, Jesica

Office of the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa of the World Bank

Departments

Office of the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa of the World Bank

Last updated: April 24, 2025

Biography

Jesica Torres is an economist in the Office of the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa of the World Bank. Her analytical work has focused on understanding how special provisions such as size-dependent regulations, simplified tax regimes, or preferential labor regulations distort both the selection into entrepreneurship and the behavior of firms, and how that ultimately affects the allocation of resources in the economy. More recently, she has studied the determinants of the entry of high-growth firms and has led or co-authored numerous reports analyzing the effect of the pandemic on the private sector using the COVID-19 Business Pulse Surveys. Before joining the World Bank in 2019, she worked as a Visiting Scholar in the Inter-American Development Bank, as an economic advisor in the Mexican federal government, and as a research-professor at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 13

Shifting Gears: The Private Sector as an Engine of Growth in the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-23) Gatti, Roberta; Onder, Harun; Islam, Asif M.; Torres, Jesica; Mele, Gianluca; Bennett, Federico; Chun, Sumin; Lotfi, Rana; Suvanov, Ilias
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is estimated to have grown at a modest rate of 1.9 percent in 2024 and is expected to grow moderately at 2.6 percent in 2025. This is against a backdrop of increased global uncertainty, particularly in trade policy. The region is far from the frontier in standards of living, largely due to low productivity. This issue of the MENA Economic Update sheds light on a critical engine of productivity growth: the private sector. Businesses create jobs, boost livelihoods, and serve as a bastion of innovation in the economy. The MENA private sector, however, is not dynamic and is ill prepared to absorb shocks. To boost the performance of the private sector, governments in the region may need to rethink their role in engaging with markets including improving competition, the business environment, and the availability of data. Additionally, private sector businesses in the region can increase performance through better management practices and harnessing untapped talent in the region.
Growth in the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-16) Gatti, Roberta; Torres, Jesica; Elmallakh, Nelly; Mele, Gianluca; Faurès, Diego; Mousa, Mennatallah Emam; Suvanov, Ilias
This issue of the MENA Economic Update presents a summary of recent macroeconomic trends, including an update of the conflict centered in Gaza and its regional spillovers, alongside an analysis of factors that shape the long-term growth potential of the region, with special attention to the persistent effects of conflicts. A modest uptick in growth is forecast for 2024, which nonetheless masks important disparities within the region. The acceleration is driven by the high-income oil exporters, while growth is expected to decelerate among developing MENA countries, both developing oil exporters and developing oil importers. Despite current challenges, the region can dramatically boost growth by better allocating talent in the labor market, leveraging its strategic location, and promoting innovation. Closing the gender employment gap, rethinking the footprint of the public sector, and facilitating technology transfers through trade under enhanced data quality and transparency can help the region leap toward the frontier. Peace is a pre-condition for catching up to the frontier, as conflict can undo decades of progress, delaying economic development by generations.
Balancing Act: Jobs and Wages in the Middle East and North Africa When Crises Hit
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-05) Gatti, Roberta; Lederman, Daniel; Elmallakh, Nelly; Torres, Jesica; Silva, Joana; Lotfi, Rana; Suvanov, Ilias
Covid-19. The Russian invasion of Ukraine. Commodity price volatility. The rise of global inflation and interest rates. Currency depreciations among indebted middle-income economies. And now, natural disasters. As a sequence of events, the consequences can be both tragic and long-lasting. After analyzing the macroeconomic prospects of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, this edition of the regional Economic Update assesses the human toll of macroeconomic shocks in terms of lost jobs and deteriorating livelihoods of the people of MENA. Growth is forecast to decelerate in 2023 after experiencing an oil-price induced growth spurt in 2022 among the high-income oil exporters of the region. Yet as the region continues to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 shock and navigates the heightened volatility in its terms of trade, the region’s labor force is contending with the ramifications for their livelihoods of the inflationary pressures associated with currency fluctuations in some countries. The authors estimate that the macroeconomic shocks of 2020-22 led to an additional 5.1 million individuals becoming unemployed in MENA. Will these shocks permanently scar the hard-working people of MENA? The report answers this question by highlighting the trade-offs facing labor markets when facing macroeconomic shocks. A critical trade-off pertains to the loss of jobs versus decreases in real incomes, neither of which is desirable. The report advocates for maintaining the flexibility of real wages and discusses policy options to support the most vulnerable.
Optimal Public Sector Premium, Talent Misallocation, and Aggregate Productivity: Evidence from the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-06) Parro, Francisco; Torres, Jesica
This paper develops a tractable general equilibrium model to quantify the aggregate productivity gains from adjusting the public sector premium and the size of the public sector to their optimal levels. In the framework, the optimal size of the public sector is contingent on the efficiency level of public goods in increasing the productivity of the private sector. The model also incorporates an endogenous decision between market and non-market activities for women. The model is calibrated using data from the Arab Republic of Egypt, a country that exhibits a disproportionate share of workers, and women especially, in the public sector. The findings show that, under a conservative value for the efficiency of the public sector, aligning the public sector premium with its optimal level, thus lowering the share of employment in the public sector, results in aggregate efficiency gains of 12 percent for output per worker and 8 percent for total factor productivity. For lower values of the elasticity of private output to public goods, the productivity gains are almost twice as large. The optimal premium is positive for women and approaches zero for men, preventing a shift of mid-high-level skilled women from the public sector to non-market activities and also a contraction of the male entrepreneurial sector. Notably, a reduced female public sector premium fosters greater female labor force participation in market activities through an expansion of the female entrepreneurial sector, which increases the demand for production labor and drives wages up.
Informality and the Life Cycle of Plants
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-09) Sarıkaya, Furkan; Tamkoç, M. Nazim; Torres, Jesica
This paper documents the life cycle of formal and informal plants using five waves of the Mexican establishment census. Formal plants begin operations with three times more workers than informal plants and exhibit faster growth rates. Throughout their life cycle, formal establishments more than double their size, while informal plants increase their size by only 77%. A general equilibrium model is developed to quantify the aggregate economic losses stemming from these growth rate disparities. In the model, plants grow through productivity investments, and informality emerges from incomplete enforcement. In equilibrium, informal plants exhibit flatter life cycle profiles to avoid detection and taxation. Model parameters are calibrated to match key properties of plant size distribution and the life cycle of plants in Mexico. Quantitative results indicate that a revenue-neutral full enforcement increases aggregate output and the overall growth rate by sixteen and twenty-five percent relative to the benchmark, respectively.
The Pecuniary and Non-Pecuniary Returns to Micro-Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Cross-Section of Women in Mexico
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-13) Williams, Benjamin; Torres, Jesica; Francis, David C.
This paper estimates the monetary and full returns to micro-entrepreneurship using a cross-section of Mexican women leveraging self-reported reservation wages. A generalized Roy model of micro-entrepreneurship choice that accounts for selection bias and non-response in earnings is estimated. The analysis exploits variation in homicide rates as an exclusion restriction to identify the average treatment-on-the-treated. The average monetary return is 4.2 percent while the average full return is 68 percent, which points to substantial non-pecuniary benefits from entrepreneurship among women. The monetary return sharply increases with years of schooling. Full returns are less steep, suggesting that non-pecuniary benefits are more salient for less educated women.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women-Led Businesses
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10) Torres, Jesica; Maduko, Franklin; Gaddis, Isis; Iacovone, Leonardo; Beegle, Kathleen
The COVID-19 pandemic has struck businesses across the globe with unprecedented impacts. The world economy has been hit hard and firms have experienced a myriad of challenges, but these challenges have been heterogeneous across firms. This paper examines one important dimension of this heterogeneity: the differential effect of the pandemic on women-led and men-led businesses. The paper exploits a unique sample of close to 40,000 mainly formal businesses from 49 countries covering the months between April and September 2020. The findings show that women-led micro-businesses, women-led businesses in the hospitality industry, and women-led businesses in countries more severely affected by the COVID-19 shock were disproportionately hit compared with businesses led by men. At the same time, women-led micro-firms were markedly more likely to report increasing the use of digital platforms, but less likely to invest in software, equipment, or digital solutions. Finally, the findings also show that women-led businesses were less likely to have received some form of public support although they have been hit harder in some domains. In a crisis of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence tracing the impact of the shock in a timely fashion is desperately needed to help inform the design of policy interventions. This real-time glimpse into women-led businesses fills this need for robust and policy-relevant evidence, and due to the large country coverage of the data, it is possible to identify patterns that extend beyond any one country, region, or sector, but at the cost of some granularity for testing more complex economic theories.
Revisiting Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11) Audretsch, David; Cruz, Marcio; Torres, Jesica
An entrepreneurial ecosystem consists of the set of complementary factors required to start a business with the potential to scale up and innovate in a particular geographic space. This paper develops a framework using an occupational choice model with knowledge-based hierarchies to assess entrepreneurial ecosystems. The framework shows that improving human capital and managerial capabilities would increase the quality of entrepreneurship, while leading to a reduction in the entrepreneurship rate. Similarly, differences in the structure of output markets, endowments, or the business environment would lead to differences in the selection into entrepreneurship and the size distribution of firms. The paper combines these elements and proposes a method to conduct entrepreneurial ecosystem diagnostics that considers the key gaps at the country level, the potential and variation of local ecosystems, and the resources available from public programs and enabling organizations to inform policy recommendations.
Technology and Resilience
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-01) Cirera, Xavier; Comin, Diego; Cruz, Marcio; Lee, Kyung Min; Torres, Jesica
This paper estimates the impact of technology sophistication pre-COVID-19 on the performance of firms during the early stages of the pandemic. It exploits a unique data set covering firms from Brazil, Senegal, and Vietnam, using a treatment effect mediation framework to decompose the results into direct and indirect effects. Increasing pre-pandemic technology sophistication by one standard deviation is associated with 3.8 percentage points higher sales. Both effects are positive, but the direct effect is about five times larger than the indirect effect. The total effect on sales is markedly nonlinear with significantly smaller estimates of the reduction in sales for firms with more sophisticated pre-pandemic technology. The results are robust to different measures of digital responses and matching estimators.
Unmasking the Impact of COVID-19 on Businesses: Firm Level Evidence from Across the World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10) Apedo-Amah, Marie Christine; Avdiu, Besart; Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio; Davies, Elwyn; Grover, Arti; Iacovone, Leonardo; Kilinc, Umut; Medvedev, Denis; Maduko, Franklin Okechukwu; Poupakis, Stavros; Torres, Jesica; Tran, Trang Thu
This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses worldwide with a focus on developing countries. The results are based on a novel data set collected by the World Bank Group and several partner institutions in 51 countries covering more than 100,000 businesses. The paper provides several stylized facts. First, the COVID-19 shock has been severe and widespread across firms, with persistent negative impact on sales. Second, the employment adjustment has operated mostly along the intensive margin (that is leave of absence and reduction in hours), with a small share of firms laying off workers. Third, smaller firms are disproportionately facing greater financial constraints. Fourth, firms are increasingly relying on digital solutions as a response to the shock. Fifth, there is great uncertainty about the future, especially among firms that have experienced a larger drop in sales, which is associated with job losses. These findings provide a better understanding of the magnitude and distribution of the shock, the main channels affecting businesses, and how firms are adjusting. The paper concludes by discussing some avenues for future research.