Person:
Olivieri, Sergio
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty and growth,
Poverty measurement,
Distributional impact of shocks,
Labor informality,
Inequality,
Social Protection and Labor
Degrees
Departments
Global Practice on Poverty, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
May 22, 2023
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.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 12
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Publication
Updating the Poverty Estimates in Serbia in the Absence of Micro Data : A Microsimulation Approach
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-05)The continued poverty impact of the financial crisis in Serbia is difficult to establish beyond 2010 because of the lack of survey data. This paper tackles this difficulty. It uses a micro-simulation approach that accounts for a key pathway of the financial crisis in Serbia, the labor market. The results suggest a further increase in poverty in 2011 on account of a continued deterioration of the labor market indicators and despite a recovering gross domestic product. In order to evaluate the forecast, the model is applied to generate forecasts for previous years (2009 and 2010), which are compared with realized poverty estimates. The micro-simulation model performs well in predicting poverty dynamics during 2009-10 and less so during 2008-09. The accuracy of the predictions improves when the response of the social protection system is accounted for. -
Publication
Rent Imputation for Welfare Measurement : A Review of Methodologies and Empirical Findings
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-11)As well acknowledged in the literature, housing is often the dominant consumption good for most households. As such, it should be included in a comprehensive welfare aggregate to measure people's living standards accurately. However, assigning a value to the flow of the dwelling for homeowners and nonmarket tenants is problematic. Over the last decades several estimation techniques have been proposed and implemented by practitioners covering from very simple to sophisticated approaches. This paper provides an extensive review of different methods to impute rent, commonly used for welfare analysis. It also gives an overview of how this problem has been addressed by other economic domains, namely national accounts, price indices, purchasing power parities, and taxation. Finally, after setting up a theoretical framework, the paper summarizes the empirical findings about the distributional impact of including imputed rents in welfare aggregates. -
Publication
Is Labor Income Responsible for Poverty Reduction? A Decomposition Approach
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-04)Demographics, labor income, public transfers, or remittances: Which factor contributes the most to observed reductions in poverty? Using counterfactual simulations, this paper accounts for the contribution labor income has made to the observed changes in poverty over the past decade for a set of 16 countries that have experienced substantial declines in poverty. In contrast to methods that focus on aggregate summary statistics, the analysis generates entire counterfactual distributions that allow assessing the contributions of different factors to observed distributional changes. Decompositions across all possible paths are calculated so the estimates are not subject to path-dependence. The analysis shows that for most countries in the sample, labor income is the most important contributor to changes in poverty. In ten of the countries, labor income explains more than half of the change in moderate poverty; in another four, it accounts for more than 40 percent of the reduction in poverty. Although public and private transfers were relatively more important in explaining the reduction in extreme poverty, more and better-paying jobs were the key factors behind poverty reduction over the past decade. -
Publication
Losing the Gains of the Past: The Welfare and Distributional Impacts of the Twin Crises in Iraq 2014
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-02)Iraq was plunged into two simultaneous crises in the second half of 2014, one driven by a sharp decline in oil prices, the other, by the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The severity and recurrent nature of these crises demand a fast understanding and quantification of their welfare impact, which is critical for policy makers. This paper employs an innovative extension of the micro-simulation methodology to provide an ex ante estimate and analysis of the complex and dynamic poverty and distributional impact of the twin crises. The results show an almost complete erosion of the welfare gains of the past, with poverty falling back to 2007 levels and a 20 percent increase in the number of the poor. While the incidence of poverty is higher among internally displaced persons than the rest of the population (except in the Islamic State–affected governorates, where poverty is higher), internally displaced persons make up only a small proportion of Iraq's eight million poor in 2014. The rest comprise of households who already lived below the poverty line, or those who have fallen below the poverty line in the face of the massive economic disruptions the country is facing. The welfare impact of the crises varies widely across space, with the largest increases in poverty headcount rates in Kurdistan and the Islamic State–affected governorates. Yet, the poorest regions in the 2014 crisis scenario are the same as in 2012, the currently Islamic State–affected, and the South, with poverty rates of 40 and 30 percent, respectively. Although the simulated results are not strictly comparable to ex post micro data estimates, because of survey coverage constraints, overall the results are very much in line, particularly in Kurdistan and the South. -
Publication
Jobs Interrupted: The Effects of COVID-19 in the LAC Labor Markets
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05)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. -
Publication
COVID-19 in LAC: High Frequency Phone Surveys - Results First Wave
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)Unemployment is rising quickly and affected households are losing their main source of incomes. There is an obvious need for speeding up public intervention in the areas of virtual learning and access to medical attention and medicines across most vulnerable households. Reducing food consumption is the main mechanism to cope with the crisis for most households across the region. Despite a large rate of approval for governments’ interventions, lack of financial support to population, lack of enforcement or late response are the key area of public dissatisfaction. Unsurprisingly, there is a wide variation in abidance with lock-down measures mandated across countries. In countries like Bolivia, El Salvador, Honduras, and Peru over 90 percent of the population report to respect and follow the lockdown. -
Publication
COVID-19 in LAC: High Frequency Phone Surveys - Results Second Wave
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07)Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to preoccupy the population in Latin America and Caribbean (LAC), as do the pandemic’s economic ramifications. The willingness and or ability of people to follow the recommendation to stay at home began to noticeably tail off by the beginning of July. A gradual return to work is observed across all countries, although the situation remains less dynamic than before COVID. Among people re-engaged in the labor market, the majority are coming back to their pre-COVID jobs. Food insecurity has receded but continues to be a major issue for many families in the region. COVID has served to exacerbate existing disparities across the region with respect to medical care. Education continued in most cases thanks to distance learning. On most countries, over 90 percent of children were able to participate in distance learning activities during second wave. -
Publication
The Costs of Staying Healthy: COVID-19 in LAC
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)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. -
Publication
COVID-19 in LAC: High Frequency Phone Surveys - Technical Note
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)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). -
Publication
Mind the Gap: How COVID-19 is Increasing Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07)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.