Narayan, Ambar

Person:
Narayan, Ambar

Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Welfare economics, Labor economics, Inequality, Poverty and social impact, Impact evaluation and economic shocks, Policy and program evaluation

ORCID

0000-0002-3529-2248

External Links

Research Gate
RePEc

Departments

Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

Last updated: January 13, 2025

Biography

Ambar Narayan, a Lead Economist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank, leads and advises teams conducting policy analysis and research in development from a microeconomic perspective. Topics that he works on include inequality of opportunity, economic mobility, policy evaluation, economic transformation, country diagnostics, and impacts of economic shocks on households. Currently, he provides leadership to teams engaged in analyzing the distributional impacts of markets, institutions and private sector participation, and the inequality implications of COVID-19 for developing countries. Ambar has been a lead author for several large World Bank studies, including a recent global report on intergenerational mobility titled “Fair Progress?” as well as reports on inequality of opportunity, poverty, and the impacts of financial crisis in developing countries. In the past, he has worked in the South Asia region of the World Bank on knowledge and lending programs. He has authored a number of scholarly publications and working papers, which reflect the eclectic mix of topics he has worked on over the years. He holds a PhD in Economics from Brown University in the United States.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 30

Does Food Insecurity Hinder Migration?: Experimental Evidence from the Indian Public Distribution System
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-08-29) Baseler, Travis; Narayan, Ambar; Ng, Odyssia; Sinha Roy, Sutirtha
People may avoid migrating if they cannot insure themselves against the risk of a bad outcome. Governments can reduce the consumption risk faced by migrants by allowing them to access social protection programs in the destination. This study randomly informed around 62,000 households across 18 Indian states about a new program allowing migrants to collect their food ration across the country, together with information about practical barriers to using the program. Four months later, treated households held lower beliefs about food ration portability, and were less likely to migrate to cities. The findings indicate that food insecurity risk reduces urban migration.
Intergenerational Mobility around the World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Ramasubbaiah, Rakesh; van der Weide, Roy; Lakner, Christoph; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Narayan, Ambar
Using individual data from over 400 surveys, this paper compiles a global database of intergenerational mobility in education for 153 countries covering 97 percent of the world’s population. For 87 percent of the world’s population, it provides trends in intergenerational mobility for individuals born between 1950 to 1989. The findings show that absolute mobility in education—the share of respondents that obtains higher levels of education than their parents—is higher in the developed world despite the higher levels of parental educational attainment. Relative mobility—measuring the degree of independence between parent and child years of schooling—is also found to be greater in the developed world. Together, these findings point to severe challenges in intergenerational mobility in the poorest parts of the world. Beyond national income levels, the paper explores the correlation between intergenerational mobility and a variety of country characteristics. Countries with higher rates of mobility have (i) higher tax revenues and rates of government expenditures, especially on education; (ii) better child health indicators (less stunting and lower infant mortality); (iii) higher school quality (more teachers per pupil and fewer school dropouts); and (iv) less residential segregation.
COVID-19 and Economic Inequality: Short-Term Impacts with Long-Term Consequences
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01) Agrawal, Sarthak; Narayan, Ambar; Bundervoet, Tom; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Davalos, Maria; Garcia, Natalia; Montalva Talledo, Veronica; Lakner, Christoph; Ten, Andrey; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Yonzan, Nishant
This paper examines the short-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for inequality in developing countries. The analysis takes advantage of high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank to assess the distributional impacts of the pandemic through the channels of job and income losses, food insecurity, and children’s education in the early days of the pandemic and subsequent period of economic recovery leading up to early 2021. It also introduces a methodology for estimating changes in income inequality due to the pandemic by combining data from phone surveys, pre-pandemic household surveys, and macroeconomic projections of sectoral growth rates. The paper finds that the pandemic had dis-equalizing impacts both across and within countries. Even under the assumption of distribution-neutral impacts within countries, the projected income losses are estimated to be higher in the bottom half of the global income distribution. Within countries, disadvantaged groups were more likely to have experienced work and income losses initially and are recovering more slowly. Inequality simulations suggest an increase in the Gini index for 29 of 34 countries in the sample, with an average increase of about 1 percent. Although these short-term impacts on inequality appear to be small, they suggest that projections of global poverty and inequality impacts of COVID-19 under the assumption of distribution-neutral changes within countries are likely to underestimate actual impacts. Finally, the paper argues that the overall inequality impacts of COVID-19 could be larger over the medium-to-long term on account of a slow and uneven recovery in many developing countries, and disparities in learning losses during pandemic-related school closures, which will likely have long-lasting effects on inequality of opportunity and social mobility.
Fair Progress?: Economic Mobility Across Generations Around the World
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-05-09) Narayan, Ambar; Van der Weide, Roy; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Lakner, Christoph; Redaelli, Silvia; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Ramasubbaiah, Rakesh Gupta N.; Thewissen, Stefan
Fair Progress? Economic Mobility Across Generations Around the World looks at an issue that has gotten much attention in the developed world, but with, for the first time, new data and analysis covering most of the world, including developing economies. The analysis examines whether those born in poverty or in prosperity are destined to remain in the same economic circumstances into which they were born, and looks back over a half a century at whether children’s lives are better or worse than their parents’ in different parts of the world. It suggests local, national, and global actions and policies that can help break the cycle of poverty, paving the way for the next generation to realize their potential and improve their lives.
COVID-19 and Inequality: How Unequal Was the Recovery from the Initial Shock?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Agrawal, Sarthak; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Montalva, Veronica; Narayan, Ambar; Bundervoet, Tom; Ten, Andrey
The restrictions on mobility and economic activity that were put in place to mitigate the health impacts of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic have had an unequal impact both across and within countries, with vulnerable populations within developing countries being affected disproportionately. An important concern is that the recovery may be similarly inequitable. Across the 17 developing countries in our sample, where policies became more conducive to mobility and economic activity, we indeed observe a partial recovery of employment and incomes in most countries, as well as improvements in food security. Although job recovery and lower policy stringency were accompanied by an overall fall in the share of the food-insecure population from 13 percent to 9 percent, those living in rural areas witnessed slower declines in food insecurity. However, the recovery was not only incomplete, but also uneven within countries. In particular, the recovery in employment among those who suffered larger initial shocks - - women, non-college-educated, and urban workers - - was not sufficient to significantly reduce the initial disparities in losses. By August-September, female employment had only recovered 30 percent of what was lost between pre-pandemic and May-June (versus 49 percent for men). Finally, more recent data for a smaller number of countries up to January 2021 indicates that while food security continued improving in these countries, recovery in employment appears to have stalled, while the disparities by gender and education persisted.
Economic Mobility Across Generations in the Developing East Asia and Pacific Region
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09) Yang, Judy; Narayan, Ambar
The pace and success of economic growth in the developing East Asia and Pacific region (EAP) has been described as nothing short of a miracle. Education and its complementarities are often linked and credited significantly for the region's positive story on economic growth. During the early stages of the region's development, education kept pace and complemented labor needs; widespread basic literacy and numeracy met demands in manufacturing and assembling. This led to rapid improvements in educational mobility across generations in absolute terms, where mobility is understood as the rise in education levels from one generation to the next. On the other hand, progress has been slower and uneven in relative mobility, which is more closely linked to inequality in education and income and refers to the extent to which an individual's position in society is influenced by that of his or her parents.
Pathways to Reducing Poverty and Sharing Prosperity in India: Lessons from the Last Two Decades
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016) Chatterjee, Urmila; Murgai, Rinku; Narayan, Ambar; Rama, Martin
India is uniquely placed to help reduce global poverty and boost prosperity. The country has the largest number of poor people in the world, as well are the largest number of people who have recently escaped poverty. There is an emerging middle class but the majority of people are still vulnerable to falling back into poverty. What lessons do the past two decades offer for what it will take for the country to sustain progress and bring about deeper changes? This synthesis brings together the key insights from extensive and in-depth research conducted by the World Bank on India’s experience in reducing poverty and sharing prosperity over the last two decades. The beginning chapter of the synthesis offers an overview of the trends in living standards and mobility in India. This is followed by a chapter on the main drivers of poverty reduction. The third chapter sheds light on some of the gaps India needs to fill for sustaining mobility and spreading prosperity more widely.
A Global Count of the Extreme Poor in 2012: Data Issues, Methodology and Initial Results
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10) Dikhanov, Yuri; Ferreira, Francisco H. G.; Hamadeh, Nada; Chen, Shaohua; Dabalen, Andrew; Prydz, Espen Beer; Jolliffe, Dean; Sangraula, Prem; Narayan, Ambar; Serajuddin, Umar; Yoshida, Nobuo; Revenga, Ana
The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank’s twin goals, the new poverty line was chosen so as to preserve the definition and real purchasing power of the earlier $1.25 line (in 2005 PPPs) in poor countries. Using the new 2011 PPPs, the new line equals $1.90 per person per day. The higher value of the line in US dollars reflects the fact that the new PPPs yield a relatively lower purchasing power of that currency vis-à-vis those of most poor countries. Because the line was designed to preserve real purchasing power in poor countries, the revisions lead to relatively small changes in global poverty incidence: from 14.5 percent in the old method to 14.1 percent in the new method for 2011. In 2012, the new reference year for the global count, we find 12.7 percent of the world’s population, or 897 million people, are living in extreme poverty. There are changes in the regional composition of poverty, but they are also relatively small. This paper documents the detailed methodological decisions taken in the process of updating both the poverty line and the consumption and income distributions at the country level, including issues of inter-temporal and spatial price adjustments. It also describes various caveats, limitations, perils and pitfalls of the approach taken.
Looking Back on Two Decades of Poverty and Well-Being in India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04) Murgai, Rinku; Narayan, Ambar
This paper provides an overview of poverty and well-being trends in India since the mid-1990s. Poverty reduction since 2005 has been much faster than the earlier decade, as a result of broad-based growth across most geographic areas. Underlying this is a pattern of high mobility in economic status that has led to an emerging middle class. Still, a vast (and rising) share of the population faces significant risk of slipping back into poverty. India's poor are increasingly concentrated in low-income states with historically lower rates of economic progress. Even as India has reduced poverty faster than the developing world as a whole, the degree of poverty reduction associated with growth has been substantially lower than in some of its middle-income peers. India faces important challenges in nonmonetary dimensions of welfare as well. Despite success on important fronts, such as infant and child mortality and secondary education, progress has been slow in others, such as sanitation and nutrition, and lags behind some other countries that are at a similar stage of development.
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.