Identifying the vulnerable to poverty from natural disasters: A new method to increase the effectiveness of shock-responsive social protections systems

Natural disasters prevent people from moving out of poverty and pull back into poverty people who were able to escape it. They are a particularly important determinant of poverty in rural areas of developing countries, where livelihoods are strongly dependent on natural resources and climatic conditions. Therefore, disaster risk response represents a fundamental policy to fight poverty in developing countries that are subject to recurrent natural shocks. How can we increase the effectiveness and efficiency of these policies making sure that support gets to the right people in a timely way? In this webinar, Pablo Acosta will present a new method to identify those that are vulnerable to fall into poverty in case of natural disasters. He will illustrate the method through the case of Typhoons in the Philippines. The proposed method represents a potentially valuable tool for building shock-responsive social protection systems that rapidly provide support to exposed and vulnerable people after a disaster, thus preventing them from falling into poverty and avoiding long-term consequences on their welfare.

SPEAKER:

Pablo Acosta is Program Leader for Human Development in Brazil.  He joined the World Bank as a Young Professional in 2008 and worked as an economist in three regions: Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and East Asia and the Pacific. Prior to the World Bank, he worked at the Latin American Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Ministry of Economy of Argentina, and the Foundation for Latin American Economic Research (FIEL). Dr. Acosta has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign (United States) and a Master of Economics from the National University of La Plata (Argentina). His main areas of expertise are social protection, labor policy, migration and skills development.

Webcast