Imran Rasul
Imran Rasul is the Research Programme Director for the IGC’s Firms research programme.
Imran Rasul is Professor of Economics at University College London. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute of Fiscal Studies and IZA, a research affiliate at BREAD and CEPR, and a member of the European Development Research Network and JPAL-Europe. His primary research interests are in labor economics, development economics, and the economics of the household. In 2007 he was jointly awarded the IZA Young Labor Economist Prize. He is currently one of the managing editors of the Review of Economic Studies.
Content by Imran Rasul
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Publication - Evidence Paper
IGC evidence paper - Firms, trade, and productivity
Productivity growth is the driving force behind economic development. A large development accounting literature has shown that much of the difference in income per capita across countries can be explained by differences in total factor productivity (TFP) (see, e.g., Hall and Jones 1999, Caselli 2005). On top of its “direct” effect on output, TFP growth can have positive...
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Project
The design of anti-poverty interventions for the ultra-poor: Asset transfers or cash transfers?
A major challenge faced by governments in low-income countries is to permanently alleviate households from poverty. Recent evidence suggests that the “Targeting the Ultrapoor” (TUP) program pioneered by BRAC in Bangladesh has proven effective and portable across settings (Banerjee et al., 2015; Bandiera et al., 2017). As a result, there has been growing interest in the...
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Publication - Project Report
Vocational training, on-the-job training, and resilience to the COVID-19 shock
In this final report, we use data from a phone survey with young workers tracked regularly since 2012 as part of an RCT on active labour market policies (Alfonsi et al. 2020) to document how they were impacted by the COVID-19 related lockdown. We targeted 1,700 young workers and successfully traced and interviewed 74% of them. The survey was conducted between October and...
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Blog post
What happens after the lockdown ends? Lessons from the 2015 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone
There have now been over 5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world, with the number of deaths moving towards 350,000. Policymakers in many countries have responded to the pandemic by implementing measures related to social distancing and a large share of humanity remains in some form of lockdown condition. As a consequence of the uncertainty caused by the...
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Blog post
From Zika to COVID-19: Can we learn lessons across pandemics?
Evidence gathered during the course of the Zika outbreak in the Americas in 2015 provides important lessons for policymakers in today’s COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought social life and economic activity to a near halt in most countries around the globe. Viruses and viral outbreaks have shaped the course of human history, with COVID-19 representing the...
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Project
The long-term impact of vocational training and job search assistance for unemployed youth: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Uganda
Youth unemployment and underemployment are key policy challenges in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where 60% of the population is below the age of 25 and where it is expected to generate one million new unemployed in 2018 alone. This project seeks to provide new evidence on the effectiveness of active labour market policies in improving youth...
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Project
Empowerment and livelihood for adolescents in Sierra Leone
Adolescence is a pivotal time for girls, it is a critical stage to create pathways for healthy and productive adulthoods. However, adolescent girls face unique barriers that restrict their horizons. This includes concurrent labour market, fertility decisions, and limited access to formal education. These considerations were at the core of our evaluation of the Empowerment...
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Data Item
Data: Researching the impact of manager characteristics in bureaucracies
We study how the management practices bureaucrats operate under correlate with the quantity of public services delivered, using data from the Nigerian Civil Service. We have hand‐coded independent engineering assessments of 4,700 project completion rates. We supplement this with a management survey in the bureaucracies responsible for these projects, building on Bloom and...
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Data Item
Data: Managing bureaucracy to improve public service delivery
We study how the management practices under which public sector bureaucrats operate, correlate to the quantity and quality of public services delivered. We do so in a developing country context, exploiting data from the Nigerian Civil Service linking public sector organizations to the individual projects they are responsible for. For each of 4700 projects, we have hand...
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Publication - Working Paper
The economic lives of young women in the time of Ebola: Lessons from an empowerment programme
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Project
Training for productivity: An experimental evaluation of civil service reform in Ghana
The Training for Productivity (TFP) project aims to improve the Ghanaian Civil Service’s capacity by designing, implementing and evaluating novel training methods for bureaucrats. The training programme will be experimentally implemented as part of broader package of training sessions coordinated by the Office of the Head of Civil Service and the Civil Service Training...
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Publication - Policy Brief
Management and bureaucratic effectiveness: A scientific replication in Ghana and Nigeria
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Publication - Project Report
Management and bureaucratic effectiveness: A scientific replication
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Project
Training for productivity: Relaxing the constraints to management and productivity in the civil service
Ghana’s civil service invests major resources into training its officers, and providing training is its main opportunity to improve officers’ productivity and management skills. But do these trainings effectively teach officers how to be more productive? Do officers actually use the skills they learn once they are back in their organisations? How can the Office of the...
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Publication - Project Report
Dynamics of public service delivery: Evidence from Bangladesh
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Project
The design of anti-poverty transfers to the ultra-poor: Asset transfers or cash transfers?
A major challenge faced by government in low-income countries is how to reduce poverty in a sustainable way. Recent evidence suggests that the “Targeting the Ultrapoor” (TUP) program pioneered by BRAC in Bangladesh has proven very effective and portable across diverse low-income settings. As a consequence, up to 30 governments were piloting variants of TUP by the end...
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Project
The effectiveness of government bureaucracy: A study of the Ghanaian civil service
The effective functioning of the public sector is crucial for economic growth. This project, requested by the Head of Ghana’s Civil Service, assessed the link between management practices and productivity in the public sector to inform reforms. The study found that granting civil servants more autonomy is associated with more effective public organisations, but...
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Project
Researching the impact of manager characteristics in bureaucracies
High-quality bureaucracy and effective public service delivery have been shown to be fundamental ingredients of growth and development. Accordingly, the Government of Bangladesh has made a priority of improving government effectiveness and administrative capacity, as stated in their 7th five-year plan published in April 2015. In this plan for 2021, recruitment,...
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Project
How did Ebola impact the economic lives of adolescent girls? Evidence on pregnancies, human capital accumulation, and labour force participation in Sierra Leone
While disease transmission of Ebola has largely been brought under control, the epidemic has left deep marks on the Sierra Leonean economy. These effects are thought to be particularly severe for adolescent girls and young women. According to data obtained using high-frequency phone surveys, youth unemployment has soared and non-farm household enterprises, the sector most...
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Publication - Project Memo
Managing Bureaucracy to Improve Public Service Delivery (Project Memo)
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Publication - Project Memo
Basic Entrepreneurship: A Big New Idea in Development (Project Memo)
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Publication - Policy Brief
Punjab Economic Opportunities Program-Livestock Component
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Project
Mapping Informal and Formal Providers on the Supply Side of the Livestock Market: Evidence from the Punjab Economic Opportunities Programme (PEOP), Pakistan
The Punjab Economic Opportunities Program (PEOP) is the flagship poverty alleviation initiative taken by the Government of Punjab to address the very high incidence of poverty in the districts of Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar, Lodhran and Muzaffargarh in Southern Punjab, Pakistan. In the rural areas, the livelihood of most of the households in this region is dependent upon...
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Publication - Working Paper
Women’s Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomised Control Trial in Africa (Working Paper)
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Project
Women’s Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomised Control Trial in Africa
Women in developing countries are disempowered relative to their contemporaries in developed countries. High youth unemployment and early marriage and childbearing interact to limit human capital investment and enforce dependence on men. In this paper, we evaluate an attempt to jump-start adolescent women’s empowerment in the world’s second youngest country: Uganda....
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Publication - Working Paper
Can basic entrepreneurship transform the economic lives of the poor? (Working Paper)
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Project
Basic entrepreneurship: A big new idea in development
Evaluation of the BRAC ultra-poor programme in Bangladesh. Targeting households of ultra-poor women, BRAC's programme has reached 1.6 million households. Project led to a 37% average increase in annual earnings. The world’s poorest people lack both capital and skills. They tend to engage in low-skilled wage labour activities that are insecure...
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Publication - Evidence Paper
IGC Evidence Paper - Firms
The IGC Firm Capabilities Research Programme pulls economists with a common interest in firm capabilities together to focus on three core questions: (i) what are the key proximate determinants of firm productivity? (ii) Where does the productive capacity of firms originate? (iii) What are the barriers that prevent resources from moving from unproductive firms and...
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Multimedia Item - Video
Video: South Asia Growth Conference 2014 - Imran Rasul
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Blog post
Managing bureaucrats
Since its inception in the 1850s, the British Civil Service has become a cornerstone of the executive branch of the UK government, translating the policy programme of the government into practice. Its practices have evolved gradually over the decades, but it is now in the midst of a major upheaval – in 2012, the Minister for the Cabinet Office and the Head of the Civil...
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Blog post
Creating Entrepreneurs: A Big New Idea in Development
Can the world’s poorest people become entrepreneurs? This column outlines results from an evaluation of the Ultra Poor programme in Bangladesh, a scheme that the NGO behind it claims is a staggering success. From an economist’s point of view, the world’s poorest people typically lack two things: capital and skills. They tend to work for others in jobs that are...
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Publication - Working Paper
Livestock asset transfers with and without training: Evidence from Rwanda (Working Paper)
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Publication - Working Paper
Management of Bureaucrats and Public Service Delivery: Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service (Working Paper)
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Publication - Working Paper
Punjab Economic Opportunities Program (Working Paper)
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Publication - Policy Brief
Punjab Economic Opportunities Program-Livestock Component (Policy Brief)
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Publication - Policy Brief
Basic Entrepreneurship: A Big New Idea in Development (Policy Brief)
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Project
Preliminary evaluation/progress report and research design of Girinka (One Cow)
This paper presents evidence from Rwanda's Girinka (`One Cow per Poor Family') programme that has distributed more than 130,000 livestock asset transfers in the form of cows to the rural poor since 2006. Supply side constraints on the programme resulted in some beneficiaries receiving complementary training with the cow transfer, and other households not receiving such...
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Project
Managing bureaucracy to improve public service delivery
Public service spending accounts for a substantial share of a country’s economic activity and is very important for economic growth Nigeria is ranked in the bottom decile of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index Reforming management practices can help delegate tasks away from corrupt officials Public services such as health,...