E T Consultant

World Bank Group • Washington, DC

2d • Onsite

About The Position

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? Working at the World Bank Group provides a unique opportunity for you to help our clients solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty, increasing shared prosperity and promoting sustainable development. With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, we work with public and private sector partners, investing in groundbreaking projects and using data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges. Please visit www.worldbank.org.

Within this architecture, the Prosperity Vertical focuses on the policies and institutions that underpin inclusive and sustainable growth, bringing together fiscal policy, public finance management, macroeconomic and poverty analysis, and private sector–enabling reforms. Prosperity’s Fiscal Policy and Growth department includes the Distributional Impact of Policies Global unit (also known as Poverty). The Poverty team focuses on integrating distributional analysis of reforms and investments into operational knowledge and lending. The Poverty team comprises applied microeconomists, statisticians, data scientists, and social and behavioral scientists who support WBG teams and governments with tools like fiscal incidence analysis and fiscal microsimulation—ensuring policies and programs reduce poverty and inequality and informing lending and prior actions where relevant.

Well-designed policy reforms can lead to improvements in economic growth, sustainability and lead to reductions in poverty. However, part of ensuring that policies are well designed requires considering the potential winners and losers and ensuring that the most vulnerable are protected from potential short-term losses. With a tighter fiscal envelope and poverty rates that have failed to decline, policies in developing countries will have to be carefully calibrated to sustain social progress. Is there room to tighten policies without having a detrimental impact on the poor? Is there scope to better articulate social protection and to introduce more efficient, effective and counter-cyclical risk-sharing plans? How much scope is there to use tax policy to pursue redistribution and risk-sharing objectives? What is the evidence on the likely distributional impact of each of the main fiscal policies such as direct and indirect taxes, transfers and subsidies? Answers to these questions could help countries to weather the economic slowdown and to provide a sound basis for redistributive and risk-sharing policies that are more responsive to risk and that support inclusive growth.

The Micro Modeling Lab

Embedded in the Distributional Impact of Policies Global unit, the Micro Modeling Lab (MML) is a team of data scientists and economists tasked with providing just-in-time assistance to regional teams working on the distributional impact of policy reforms. The objective is to inform the Bank’s analytical and operational work, ensuring that intervention design and implementation appropriately considers the poverty and distributional impacts by providing just-in-time expertise.

The Micro Modeling Lab works with Poverty economists on the ground and with other Global Solutions Groups to develop and scale tools and solutions across teams, including through testing and adaptation, development of platforms, and hands-on support to country teams. In addition, the team is tasked with capturing, curating and disseminating operational solutions.

Requirements

• Master’s degree or equivalent in Economics, Statistics, or related field.
• A minimum of 5 years of relevant professional experience working with economic data and analytical tools and models to conduct fiscal incidence analyses.
• Experience building or working with micro-simulation models to assess the distributional impact of alternative policy reforms. Experience working with both household and administrative data is desirable.
• Strong experience with data analysis and programming in STATA; R and Python are considered a plus. Experience in using Git or code sharing platforms.
• Demonstrated capability to conduct research independently, paired with the ability to collaborate with others as part of a multicultural and multidisciplinary team.
• Excellent written, communication, and presentation skills in English; this includes the ability to convey complex ideas in a creative, clear, direct, and lively style.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Undertake fiscal incidence analysis for different country teams, ensuring the applications follow standards and protocols as defined by the Micro Modeling Lab team in the World Bank. All coding protocols and data archiving should be shared through Github and SharePoint.
• Complete the integration of different fiscal incidence analyses into a global microsimulation model for cross-country fiscal incidence analysis.
• Undertake microsimulations of alternative reform measures, and if requested provide a write-up including the assumptions to estimate the distributional impact of alternative reforms.
• Contribute to the development, implementation and/or improvement of standardized analytical/micro-simulation and visualization tools to support the Bank’s analytical and operational work.
• Participate in activities and exchange information with other World Bank teams working on similar issues across sectors and Global Solution Groups.
• Like all members of the Poverty global practice, the consultant will also be expected to contribute to the global knowledge base of the department.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level