Olivieri, Sergio

Person:
Olivieri, Sergio

Global Practice on Poverty, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Poverty and growth, Poverty measurement, Distributional impact of shocks, Labor informality, Inequality, Social Protection and Labor

Departments

Global Practice on Poverty, The World Bank

Last updated: June 28, 2024

Biography

Sergio Olivieri is an economist in the Poverty Reduction and Equity department of the World Bank, based in Washington, DC. His main research areas are ex-ante analysis of the distributional impact of macroeconomic shocks, understanding the main channels through which economic growth affects poverty reduction, income distribution and multidimensional poverty. Olivieri has published articles about labor informality, polarization, mobility and inequality issues, most of them focused on Latin-American countries. He has also contributed to research reports on inequality, poverty, social cohesion and macroeconomic shocks. Before joining the Bank, Olivieri worked as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nation Development Program and the European Commission. He has taught courses on micro-simulation and micro-decomposition techniques for public servants and staff in international organizations around the world. He has also worked as an assistant professor of labor economics in the Department of Economics of Universidad National de La Plata in Buenos Aires, and as a researcher in the university's Center of Distributional, Labor and Social Studies.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 40

Measuring Green Jobs: A New Database for Latin America and Other Regions
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-06) Winkler, Hernán; Di Maro, Vincenzo; Montoya, Kelly; Olivieri, Sergio; Vazquez, Emmanuel
A growing body of literature investigates the labor market implications of scaling up “green” policies. Since most of this literature is focused on developed economies, little is known about the labor market consequences for developing countries. This paper contributes to filling this gap by providing new stylized facts on the prevalence of green occupations and sectors across countries at varying levels of economic development. Green occupations are defined using the Occupational Information Network, and green sectors are those with relatively lower greenhouse gas emissions per worker. The paper offers an initial assessment of how the implementation of green policies—aimed at expanding green sectors and strengthening the relative demand for green skills—may affect workers in developing economies. It finds that the share of green jobs is strongly correlated with the level of gross domestic product per capita across countries. When controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, a 1 percent increase in gross domestic product per capita is associated with 0.4 and 4.1 percentage point increases in the shares of new and emerging, and enhanced skills green jobs, respectively. The paper then focuses on Latin America and finds that only 9 percent of workers have a green job with respect to both occupation and sector. The findings show that within countries, workers with low levels of income and education are more likely to be employed in non-green sectors and occupations, and to lack the skills for a greener economy. This evidence suggests that complementary policies are needed to mitigate the potential role of green policies in widening income inequality between and within countries.
Understanding Vulnerability to Poverty and Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-28) Canavire Bacarreza, Gustavo J.; Conconi, Adriana; Olivieri, Sergio; Serio, Monserrat
This paper provides the first measures of vulnerability to poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean at the household level looking at natural hazards such as floods, landslides, cyclones, earthquakes, and droughts. It considers seven countries in the region: Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru. The paper constructs a unique data base that links household surveys from the Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean database to data on natural hazards from the ThinkHazard database and Emergency Events Database, which permits the first estimates of how household exposure to natural events raises the probability of being poor. The results suggest that vulnerability to poverty is related to households' coping and adaptation strategies, and there is great heterogeneity depending on the natural hazard assumed. The evidence generated by this approach helps in understanding the lack of coping mechanisms and adaptation strategies among vulnerable households. This understanding can be used to mitigate the effects of natural disasters. The evidence-based approach is useful for identifying specific vulnerable communities in disaster-prone areas. Furthermore, the information can be presented in the most disaggregated representative unit that the data allow so that policy makers can build more efficient management policies in their location.
Reconstructing 2010–2022 Poverty and Inequality Trends in Bangladesh: A Statistical Matching Approach
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-05) Fernandez, Jaime; Olivieri, Sergio; Wambile, Ayago
The 2022 Household Income and Expenditure Survey enhances fieldwork, data management, and information quality but poses comparability challenges with previous rounds. This study proposes a two-step process based on statistical matching to fill the information gap in previous survey rounds. This methodology uses the more comprehensive 2022 information to reconstruct comparable consumption measures over time. This allows for a consistent assessment of poverty and inequality measures, providing insights into the changes for policy makers, researchers, and stakeholders over the years. The results reveal that integrating this correction into previous survey rounds would have reduced poverty rates by around 10.6 percentage points between 2010 and 2016 and a further decrease of 7.8 percentage points between 2016 and 2022. Likewise, extreme poverty rates would have witnessed a decline of approximately 3 percentage points in the earlier period and a more substantial drop of 3.6 percentage points in the more recent one. These poverty reduction trends mirror improvements in other dimensions of well-being, like reductions in infant mortality and stunting and increases in access to electricity, sanitary toilets, and literacy rates.
A Methodology for Updating International Middle-Class Lines for the Latin American and Caribbean Region
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-05-22) Fernandez, Jaime; Olivieri, Sergio; Sanchez, Diana
The middle class in Latin America and the Caribbean has been a central focus of policy debates in the region since the COVID-19 pandemic began. To identify and track vulnerable and middle-class populations accurately, it is necessary to update the upper and lower bounds for the middle class using 2017 purchasing power parity exchange rates. This paper contributes with a two-step methodology for updating these thresholds. The method indicates that updating the $13 lower-bound line in 2011 purchasing power parity dollars to 2017 purchasing power parity dollars results in a vulnerability line of $14. The study also finds an upper bound of $81 per person per day in 2017 purchasing power parity, compared with $70 in 2011 purchasing power parity. These thresholds are robust to a variety of assumptions and methodologies. The results of this study indicate that the proportion of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean classified as middle class increased from 36.3 percent in 2011 to 37.2 percent in 2017. However, there were no significant changes in the characteristics of this group.
Considering Labor Informality in Forecasting Poverty and Inequality: A Microsimulation Model for Latin American and Caribbean Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-07-12) Montoya, Kelly; Olivieri, Sergio; Braga, Cicero
Economists have long been interested in measuring the poverty and distributional impacts of macroeconomic projections and shocks. In this sense, microsimulation models have been widely used to estimate the distributional effects since they allow accounting for several transmission channels through which macroeconomic forecasts could impact individuals and households. This paper innovates previous microsimulation methodology by introducing more flexibility in labor earnings, considering intra-sectoral variation according to the formality status, and assessing its effect on forecasting country-level poverty, inequality, and other distributive indicators. The results indicate that the proposed methodology accurately estimates the intensity of poverty in the most immediate years indistinctively of how labor income is simulated. However, allowing for more intra-sectoral variation in labor income leads to more accurate projections in poverty and across the income distribution, with gains in performance in the middle term, especially in atypical years such as 2020.
Mind the Gap: How COVID-19 is Increasing Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07) Clavijo, Irene; Mejía-Mantilla, Carolina; Olivieri, Sergio; Lara-Ibarra, Gabriel; Romero, Javier; Balch, Oliver
The most vulnerable households in Latin America and the Caribbean have been disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, endangering the region’s inclusive development path. High-Frequency Phone Surveys show that two months into the pandemic, in May 2020, the gaps between the most vulnerable and the least vulnerable households in terms of job loss and income loss. The uneven impacts went beyond monetary indicators, as disadvantaged households suffered from higher levels of food insecurity and had lower access to good quality health and education services, such as online sessions with a teacher. To prevent the pandemic from erasing years of progress against inequality, the most vulnerable households require short-term support to overcome their liquidity constraints via safety net transfers, thus guaranteeing that their basic needs are met. In the medium term, government efforts should be focused on the recovery of households’ primary source of income through labor market policies that actively support the placement of the less advantaged groups and improve their employability. Equally important, it is necessary to curb losses related to human capital accumulation, given the long-term consequences that this entails. The return to in-person schooling, under strict bio-security protocols, is encouraged. When not possible, schools and parents should be provided with better tools to support distance learning.
The Welfare Costs of Being Off the Grid
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07) Ballon, Paola; Mejia-Mantilla, Carolina; Olivieri, Sergio; Lara-Ibarra, Gabriel; Romero, Javier; Balch, Oliver
Digital connectivity has been a critical mitigating factor for the adverse effects of lockdowns implemented in response to the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic on household welfare in Latin America and the Caribbean. Households with access to digital technologies were able to cope better with the shock. rates. More connected households also reported lower income losses, fewer instances of food insecurity and higher access to high quality remote learning. The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has underlined the importance of ensuring that all segments of the population have access to digital technologies and of promoting digital skills throughout the lifecycle of individuals.
Jobs Interrupted: The Effects of COVID-19 in the LAC Labor Markets
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05) Mejia-Mantilla, Carolina; Olivieri, Sergio; Rivadeneira, Ana; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Romero, Javier
Given the importance of labor income in the region, there are several important questions about the effects of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on the labor market. At the outset of the pandemic, 48 percent of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) workers stopped working and 16 percent lost their job. Yet, were job losses similar for all workers? Has the COVID-19 shock exacerbated unfavorable labor market conditions for vulnerable groups over time? What happened to those workers who remained employed throughout the early months of the pandemic? And, what lessons can be drawn from the experience? This note sheds light on these inquiries using household data from the LAC high-frequency phone surveys (HFPS) which were collected between May and August of 2020 from 13 countries in the region.
COVID-19 in LAC: High Frequency Phone Surveys - Technical Note
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04) Mejía-Mantilla, Carolina; Olivieri, Sergio; Rivadeneira, Ana; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Romero, Javier
Latin American and the Caribbean is one of the regions in the world most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the welfare impacts for households have been severe. At the macroeconomic level, the World Bank estimates a contraction of 6.9 percent of the region’s GDP in 2020, due to pandemic-control measures and the deceleration of the global economy (World Bank, 2021). Regional export prices significantly dropped in the first semester of 2020 (5.2 percent) (Inter-American Development Bank, 2020), and although they began to recover in the second half of the year, the volume of goods-exports dropped by 8 points by the third quarter of 2020 (World Bank, 2021).
The Costs of Staying Healthy: COVID-19 in LAC
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04) Ballon, Paola; Mejia-Mantilla, Carolina; Olivieri, Sergio; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Romero, Javier
COVID-19 closures in Latin American and the Caribbean countries helped to curb the spread of the virus, but inevitably brought negative consequences for households, principally in the form of job losses, income reduction, and, in some cases, food insecurity. Future policy measures should aim to strike the right balance between saving lives and protecting livelihoods. Where closures are necessary, they should be adapted to a country's labor market and other localized conditions so as to minimize profound welfare losses. Governments should strive for robust and agile social safety net systems to be able to respond to the sudden falls in household welfare.