Person:
Molini, Vasco
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Welfare economics,
Labor economics,
Inequality,
Conflicts
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Poverty and Equity Global Practice, Middle East and North Africa region, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Vasco Molini is Senior Economist in the Poverty & Equity Global Practice Group. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Florence and his BA from Bocconi University. He is currently working on the Maghreb region. His main scientific interests are inequality and income distribution in Sub Saharan Africa and Middle East and North Africa regions. His research has been published in the Journal of Development Economics, Review of Income and Wealth, World Development and Food Policy.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 29
-
Publication
Poverty in Mozambique : New Evidence from Recent Household Surveys
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-10)This paper has three primary objectives: (i) to investigate potential problems regarding Mozambique's most recent nationally representative household survey on poverty dynamics; (ii) to assess the robustness and reliability of official poverty statistics; and (iii) to provide alternative estimates of poverty and welfare indicators in light of the methodological and analytical issues raised in areas (i) and (ii). It is determined that at least two significant weaknesses affect the official poverty-rate estimates: measurement errors in consumption data and flaws in the methodology used to calculate poverty lines (the cost-of-basic-needs approach based on provincial food bundles with entropy correction). A number of observations appear to be affected by substantial measurement errors, which severely distort the official poverty statistics. The paper provides methods to correct the consumption distribution by recalculating poverty lines based on a single national food basket -- as opposed to the current estimates, which are based on province-specific food baskets. The revised poverty statistics differ considerably from the official estimates of poverty across provinces and are far more consistent with other poverty indicators. In addition, poverty appears to be highly concentrated in certain areas, with dramatically higher rates found in Central and Northern Mozambique, as well as in rural areas overall, compared with relatively low rates in Southern Mozambique and in the country's urban centers. These findings substantially contradict the government's official poverty figures, which appear to systematically overestimate poverty rates in Mozambique's Southern provinces and urban areas while simultaneously underestimating the prevalence of poverty in the country's Central and Northern regions and in rural areas nationwide. -
Publication
Can We Measure Resilience? A Proposed Method and Evidence from Countries in the Sahel
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-01)Although resilience has become a popular concept in studies of poverty and vulnerability, it has been difficult to obtain a credible measure of resilience. This difficulty is because the data required to measure resilience, which involves observing household outcomes over time after every exposure to a shock, are usually unavailable in many contexts. This paper proposes a new method for measuring household resilience using readily available cross section data. Intuitively, a household is considered resilient if there is very little difference between the pre- and post-shock welfare. By obtaining counterfactual welfare for households before and after a shock, households are classified as chronically poor, non-resilient, and resilient. This method is applied to four countries in the Sahel. It is found that Niger, Burkina Faso, and Northern Nigeria have high percentages of chronically poor: respectively, 48, 34, and 27 percent. In Senegal, only 4 percent of the population is chronically poor. The middle group, the non-resilient, accounts for about 70 percent of the households in Senegal, while in the other countries it ranges between 34 and 38 percent. Resilient households account for about 33 percent in all countries except Niger, where the share is around 18 percent. -
Publication
Vulnerability to Malnutrition in the West African Sahel
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-01)This study estimates marginal increase in malnutrition for children ages 1-3 years from exposure to an extreme shock in the West African Sahel. The study uses knowledge of a child's birth and high resolution spatial and temporal distribution of shocks, calculated from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and satellite-based measures of rainfall and temperature to link a child to the shock experienced in-utero. The study finds that while around 20 percent of the children in the sample are stunted or underweight, more than 30 percent of the children in the sample are highly vulnerable to either form of malnutrition. -
Publication
Poverty Reduction in Ghana—Progress and Challenges: Overview
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)Ghana over the past two decades has enjoyed steady and robust growth, mainly through a modification in its economic structure: as the economy gradually shifted out of agriculture and into services, the country experienced noticeable advances in productivity. Agriculture's share of value added to GDP has declined at a faster rate since 2005, whereas the share of services has remained virtually unchanged. Employment has adjusted in line with the changes in the structure of the economy, with a progressive shift from the country side to urban areas. However, many challenges remain, in particular the fairly high share of the population still living in poverty and the persistent gender gaps in productive activities. -
Publication
No Condition is Permanent: Middle Class in Nigeria in the Last Decade
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-03)The economic debate on existence and definition of the middle class has become particularly lively in many developing countries. Despite this growing interest, the identification of the middle class group in these countries remains quite challenging. Building on a recently developed framework to define the middle class, this paper tries to estimate the Nigerian middle class size in a rigorous quantitative manner. By exploiting publicly available panel data, the expenditure associated to a 10 percent probability of falling into poverty is estimated, and this is used as the middle class threshold for Nigeria. The threshold expenditure for the middle class in Nigeria is found to be 378.39 Naira per capita per day (2010 PPP). Relying on this threshold and through survey-to-survey imputation the size of Nigeria's middle class in 2003 is also estimated. The results show that there has been considerable improvement on the size of the middle class and poverty reduction between 2003 and 2013. Poverty decreased between 2003 and 2013 from 45 to 33 percent, while the middle class increased from 13 percent to 19 percent. Nevertheless the results still paint a heterogeneous picture of poverty and the middle class in Nigeria, where the largest portion of the population, although above the poverty threshold, continues to live with average or high vulnerability to poverty. -
Publication
Are We Confusing Poverty with Preferences?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04)Modifying the national poverty line to the context of observed consumption patterns of the poor is becoming popular. A context-specific poverty line would be more consistent with preferences. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence that the contrary holds and that the national poverty line is more appropriate for comparing living standards among the poor, at least under prevailing conditions in Mozambique and Ghana. The problem lies in the risk of downscaling the burden associated with cheap-calorie diets and the low nonfood component of the rural poor. The paper illustrates how observed behavior may neither reveal preferences nor detect heterogeneous preferences among the poor. Rather, the consumption pattern is the upshot of the poverty condition itself. Poverty is confused with preferences if observed cheap-calorie diets are seen as a matter of taste, whereas in fact they reflect a lack of means to consume a preferred diet of higher quality, as food Engel curve estimates indicate. Likewise, a smaller nonfood component is not a matter of a particular distaste, but an adaptation to the fact that various nonfood items (such as transport) and basic services (such as electricity and health) are simply absent in rural areas. -
Publication
All that Glitters Is Not Gold: Polarization Amid Poverty Reduction in Ghana
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-07)Ghana is an exceptional case in the Sub-Saharan Africa landscape. Together with a handful of other countries, Ghana offers the opportunity to analyze the distributional changes in the past two decades, since four comparable household surveys are available. In addition, different from many other countries in the continent, Ghana's rapid growth translated into fast poverty reduction. A closer look at the distributional changes that occurred in the same period, however, suggests less optimism. The present paper develops an innovative methodology to analyze the distributional changes that occurred and their drivers, with a high degree of accuracy and granularity. Looking at the results from 1991 to 2012, the paper documents how the distributional changes hollowed out the middle of the Ghanaian household consumption distribution and increased the concentration of households around the highest and lowest deciles; there was a clear surge in polarization indeed. When looking at the drivers of polarization, household characteristics, educational attainment, and access to basic infrastructure all tended to increase over time the size of the upper and lower tails of the consumption distribution and, as a consequence, the degree of polarization. -
Publication
Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Internal Migration and Household Welfare in Ghana
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-07)This papers investigates to what extent internal migration contributes to improving households' welfare in Ghana. Using the most recent and nationally representative household survey (Ghana Living Standards Survey 2012/13), the estimates indicate that on average migration increases consumption significantly, and the effect is driven by households migrating from inland regions to the coastal areas of the country. The analysis also finds heterogeneous effects by gender and educational attainment, with migrant households headed by males and highly educated individuals faring significantly better than migrant households headed by females and low-educated individuals. The paper shows convincing evidence that the positive impact of migration on consumption is attributable to a physical mobility effect rather than changes in labor force status or sector of economic activity. However, the migration process in Ghana has important downsides, such as the brain drain and disruption of the social fabric in the communities originating migration. Future research in this area is warranted to have a more comprehensive picture of the social impact of migration in Ghana. -
Publication
No Condition Is Permanent: Middle Class in Nigeria in the Last Decade
(Taylor and Francis, 2017-09-21)The economic debate on the existence and definition of the middle class has become particularly lively in many developing countries. Building on a recently developed framework called the Vulnerability Approach to Middle Class (VAMC) to define the middle class, this paper tries to estimate the size of the Nigerian middle class in a rigorous quantitative manner and to gauge its evolution over time. Using the VAMC method, the middle class group can be defined residually from the vulnerability analysis as those for which the probability of falling into poverty is below a certain threshold. The results show that there has been considerable improvement in the size of the Nigerian middle class from 13 per cent in 2003/4 to 19 per cent in 2012/13. However, the rate has been slower than expected given the high growth rates experienced in the country over the same period. The results also paint a heterogeneous picture of the middle class in Nigeria with large spatial differences. The southern regions have a higher share and experienced more growth of the middle class compared with the northern regions. -
Publication
When the Centre Cannot Hold: Patterns of Polarization in Nigeria
(Wiley, 2017-12)This paper advances the hypothesis that Nigeria is going through a process of economic polarization. The notion of polarization is concerned with the disappearance or non-consolidation of the middle class, which occurs when there is a tendency to concentrate in the tails, rather than the middle, of the income/consumption distribution. This paper uses newly available data and the relative distribution methodology (Handcock and Morris, 1998, 1999) to present new results on polarization. The findings confirm the sharp increase of polarization. Compared to 2003, the distribution of consumption has become more concentrated in upper and lower deciles in 2013, while the middle deciles have thinned. A between-group analysis shows the emergence of a macro-regional gap: while the South-South and South-West regions contribute mainly to polarization in the upper tail, households in the North East and North West zones—the conflict-stricken areas—are more likely to fall in the lower national deciles.