Samuel Freije

• PhD
• Economist at World Bank

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had severe negative economic impacts on households and businesses in Russia. Russia’s GDP declined by 2,7% in 2020. To mitigate the adverse impacts of the pandemic, in March—June 2020 the govern- ment implemented a number of fiscal and social policy measures aimed at support- ing businesses, employment and incomes of vu...

This chapter reviews the World Bank’s contribution to China’s extraordinary success in reducing poverty. First, it outlines the form of the World Bank’s contribution. The World Bank’s extensive advisory role and partnership with China, alongside its major and explicitly poverty-related programs, are elaborated therein. Second, the chapter provides...

The official poverty reduction strategy defined by the “Outline for Development Oriented Poverty Reduction for China’s Rural Areas (2011-2020)”, has a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, economic development that creates employment opportunities for the poor. On the other hand, expansion of the social protection system to protect the vulnerable....

This chapter complements the macro-approaches presented in previous ones and adopts a microeconomic approach to assess what would happen to household welfare if energy subsidies were removed. It aims to identify changes in welfare indicators at the national level and by groups within the national population defined by their socioeconomic, demograph...

Después de la crisis económica de 2008, las brechas de género en desempleo y participación laboral se redujeron en México. Para identificar los determinantes que permitieron dicha reducción, estimamos un modelo probit con datos de 2007 y 2017 de la Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo (ENOE), año en que la tasa de desempleo regresó a niveles pre...

Previous Poverty and Shared Prosperity Reports have conveyed the difficult message that the world is not on track to meet the global goal of reducing extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. This edition brings the unwelcome news that COVID-19, along with conflict and climate change, has not merely slowed global poverty reduction but reversed it for f...

The unemployment and labor force participation gender gaps narrowed in Mexico after the 2008 global economic crisis, when female labor force participation increased. This paper aims to understand female labor force participation growth and identify its main determinants. For that purpose , the paper estimates a probit model with data from the Natio...

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This paper uses Mongolia’s Household Socio Economic Survey for 2016 to estimate the distributive impact of taxes and transfers. The findings show that the system is progressive and contributes to reductions in poverty and inequality. The Gini coefficient of the pre-tax-and-transfer income is 0.4183 and decreases to 0.3507 after-tax-and-transfer. Th...

This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask two major questions. First, do panel income changes favor the income recipients who started at the top of the income distribution (“divergent mobility”) or those who started at th...

The aims of this chapter are to analyze labor market trends in Mexico during the recent crisis and to discuss the policies the government implemented to cope with it. We identify the groups most affected by the crisis and how the policies Mexico adopted helped those groups weather the recession. In addition, we compare public spending plans to fisc...

Any time there is an economic crisis; there is the very real potential that its consequences for human welfare will be severe. Thus when the developed world plunged into such a crisis in 2008 and growth rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) began to plummet, fears rose that the region will suffer rising unemployment, poverty, malnutrition,...

Explores the effects of the 2008-09 global financial crisis on poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. the authors describe and deconstruct the effects of the crisis on poverty using data from comparable household budget surveys and labor surveys. The authors also provide macro-micro modeling of crisis and no-crisis scenarios for Brazil and Mex...

We evaluate the Mexican training program for the unemployed PROBECAT/SICAT using methods that control for observable and non-observable factors. Comparing the different results over time allows us to gauge the size and evolution of hidden bias. We also compute the average treatment effect and the treatment effect on the treated. Our approach reveal...

This paper evaluates if, after ten years of implementation, the renowned conditional cash transfer program "Oportunidades" has had an effect on labor market outcomes among young beneficiaries in rural Mexico. We use the 2007 panel wave of the Rural Households Evaluation Survey and apply a multi-treatment methodology for different time exposition to...

The 2008-09 economic crisis has had a long-lasting negative impact on the Mexican economy. This paper examines labor market dynamics in Mexico in light of the crisis. The labor market has been characterized in recent years by low relative unemployment, but high levels of informal jobs, low-growth, and almost stagnant real wages. In this context, th...

Gender disparities are an important component of overall inequality. This paper main objective is to assess the relationship between gender disparities and trade for the DR-CAFTA region and, more specifically, to answer these two questions: a) does trade expansion increase women"s employment opportunities relative to men"s? b) What are the effects...

A 10 años del programa en zoas rurales, este capítulo analiza el efecto del programa sobre el empleo, salarios y movilidad ocupacional respecto a los padres de los jóvenes en hogares beneficiarios rurales. Se implementa una metodología cuasi experimental utilizando la variación de entrada en localidades y variables pre programa. Los resultados no m...

El análisis de la distribución y redistribución del ingreso en Venezuela se puede resumir en tres conclusiones generales. En primer lugar, la distribución del ingreso en Venezuela es más desigual en el año 2000 que a finales de la década de 1970. En segundo lugar, esta situación se debe a un descenso en la acumulación de capital que está también as...

This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask whether those individuals who start in the best economic position are those who experience the largest earnings gains or the smallest earnings losses; this is the “divergent mobil...

This article summarizes a microsimulation exercise for the Mexican human development program Oportunidades and presents a series of simulations of its actual and potential impact upon poverty at the national, urban and rural levels. The microsimulation tool used for this paper makes accounting and behavioral exercises and aims to answer three main...

[Excerpt] Economic mobility has not been widely studied in developing countries until very recently owing to the lack of suitable data. Studying mobility requires longitudinal data tracking economic units (that is, individuals, households, or firms) over time. Collecting this type of data is expensive, and historically few Latin American countries...

This paper summarizes the findings of an impact evaluation of the Mexican training programs PROBECAT_SICAT for the period 1999-2004. The paper has five additional sections. Section 2 provides an account of the Mexican public policy towards the unemployed and a description of the institutional and operative capacity of this policy for the last two d...

In countries that have implemented mass privatization programs, such as the transition economies of Eastern Europe, it seems reasonable to think that the divestment process affected the overall economy, rather than a single firm, group of firms, or economic activity. The large flow of workers from the public to the private sector alone might have a...

[Excerpt] In this paper, we analyse the dynamics of household per capita incomes using longitudinal data from Indonesia, South Africa, Spain and Venezuela. We find that in all four countries reported initial income and job changes of the head are consistently the most important variables in accounting for income changes, overall and for initially p...

We analyze household income dynamics using longitudinal data from Indonesia, South Africa (KwaZulu-Natal), Spain and Venezuela. In all four countries, households with the lowest reported base-year income experienced the largest absolute income gains. This result is robust to reasonable amounts of measurement error in two of the countries. In three...

[Excerpt] This study presents the main results of a larger, more technical report (Fields and others 2001) and subsequent work (Fields and others 2002) that analyzes income mobility in Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, and Venezuela. These economies were selected on the basis of the availability of panel data with which to analyze household income dy...

In this paper, we decompose the variance of logarithmic monthly earnings of prime age males into its permanent and transitory components, using a five-wave rotating panel from the Venezuelan "Encuesta de Hogares por Muestreo" from 1995 to 1997. As far as we know, this is the first time a variance components model is estimated for a developing count...

The causes of informality are many and range from imperfections in existing legislation and segmentation of the labor markets to macroeconomic adjustment programs and globalization. Some see in informality a mechanism for escaping unemployment, while for others it generates a spirit of entrepreneurship.

We analyze household income dynamics using longitudinal data from Indonesia, South Africa, Spain and Venezuela. With one exception, incomes regress towards the grand mean, despite rising income inequality. This result is robust to measurement error in income. We conclude empirically that factors encouraging convergence such as serially correlated s...

La expansión del empleo informal en las últimas décadas ha venido acompañada por una falta de protección social y un empleo de baja productividad y bajos salarios. En este informe se resumen las características y los principales aspectos del sector informal en América Latina y el Caribe. En la sección 2 se ilustra el tamaño y la tendencia del secto...

The expansion of the informal sector in the last decades has been accompanied by a lack of almost every form of social protection and low-productivity/low-wage employment. This report summarizes the characteristics of the informal sector and provides policy recommendations to tackle it. Section 2 illustrates the size and trend of the informal secto...

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The goal of this paper is to identify the sources of income, positional and poverty dynamics among Venezuelan households in the late nineties. The paper answers two fundamental questions: What are the factors associated with changes in income, relative position and poverty status among Venezuelan households in the late nineties? Are there relevant...

An analysis of distribution and redistribution of income in Venezuela leads to three general conclusions. In first place, the distribution of income is more unequal in 2000 than by the end of the seventies. In second place, this situation is due to a drop in the accumulation of capital, also linked to the collapse of the product and the income. In...

Our main objective in this paper is to study the effects of privatization on income distribution and welfare. We use household-level data from Nicaragua because privatization in this country occurred during a transition from a command to a market system, and it is likely that the massive privatization process that took place affected the economy as...

El estudio evidencia que la desigualdad salarial en el país se incrementó tras el ingresó al Tratado de Libre Comercio y hasta 1997, para descender levemente en los siguientes tres años.

[Excerpt] In the last decades Latin American countries have experienced substantial macroeconomic instability. While the region as a whole experienced economic growth during most of the 1990’s and 2000’s, there were also years of stagnation as well as economic decline.

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