Reflections on Working in a Research Unit within the World Bank
Since July 2021, I have worked at the office of the Chief Economist, Infrastructure Vice-Presidency. Here, I focus on conducting research, synthesizing evidence and data to inform strategic decisions, and contributing to knowledge products — at the global, regional, and country-specific levels. While I continued to support the Digital Development Global Practice, I primarily focused on analytical engagement (often termed ‘technical assistance’) with lesser emphasis on lending (often termed ‘operational work’).
First, some background on where the Office of the Infrastructure Chief Economist sits within the organizational structure of the Bank and what we do, as I’m often asked about this. The World Bank adopts a matrix structure, with four Global Practice Vice-Presidencies (Human Development [HD], Infrastructure [INF], Sustainable Development [SD] and Equitable Finance and Institutions [EFI]) and seven Regional Vice-Presidencies (Latin America and the Caribbean [LCR], Eastern Europe and Central Asia [ECA], Middle East and North Africa [MENA], Western and Central Africa [AFW], Eastern and Southern Africa [AFE], South Asia [SAR], and East Asia and the Pacific [EAP]). The Office of the Infrastructure Chief Economist sits within the Infrastructure Vice-Presidency. It supports all four INF Global Practices (Transport, Energy and Extractives, Digital Development, and Infrastructure, PPPs, Guarantees) and all of the Regional Vice-Presidencies with research and strategic advice, often on specific challenges and based on their own requests.
In practical terms, for Digital Development (my area of focus), this has included engaging with regional leadership on key findings from the World Development Report 2021: Data for Better Lives, providing data and evidence to support the Development Committee paper on Digitalization and Development and other strategic documents internally, helping review papers submissions to the flagship conference Infra4Dev (co-organized this year with the London School of Economics), working on several country-level Infrastructure Sectoral Assessments (InfraSAPs), providing just-in-time monitoring updates on key sectoral developments for senior management, and writing chapters and background notes for sectoral and regional flagship reports.
I continued to maintain a predominantly analytical portfolio in countries where I had contributed operationally. In Myanmar, I led analytics for the Digital Development sector monitoring note which fed into the Myanmar Economic Monitor. In Romania, I continued to work on an evaluation of ESIF funds in the ICT sector. In the Caribbean, I wrote a Project completion report (also called an ‘ICR’) for a ten-year project that was completed in Dec 2021 and contributed to another ICR for the Project I worked on in Afghanistan. Working across operational teams while focusing on research is hard — and I took some time to find the right balance. Operational timelines, by nature, are tight — and good, rigorous research often takes longer to complete. At the same time, knowing that my work directly contributed to decision-making motivated me to persevere.
Some reflections on working in research units vis-a-vis operations within the World Bank:
- Research units come in various shapes and forms, even within the World Bank: on one end, that closest to academia, is the Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC). On the other, is Global teams that support operational business lines with analytics and toolkits. I found that the Chief Economist Offices lay somewhere in between on that spectrum. The questions we answered were often germane to operational decisions, and demand-driven in many cases. At the same time, the outputs used rigorous methods, often finding their place in the World Bank Policy Research Working Papers series and academic journals. An advantage of working within the Office of the Infrastructure Chief Economist was being able to collaborate across these teams in DEC and in the Global Practices, and sometimes even with other Chief Economist Offices: it gave me perspective on the nature of work of different units within the group.
2. My day-to-day experience working in research vis-a-vis operations has been that the former entails fewer working meetings, and a lot more unstructured time for analytical work. While in operations, I found my schedule constantly packed with overlapping meetings (clients, internal partners, external partners, management, team), in a way that my schedule this past year was not. One thing that I found quite valuable as practice within my team, was a weekly tour-de-table of all the work being done by various members, which allowed us to connect the dots in various ways.
3. It is essential to delineate time between longer-term projects and short-term deliverables during the work week to set oneself up for success. I often struggled with this, as I felt the need to deliver several short-term high-quality outputs, which often took all my time during a week. Over the year, I learned to better estimate the time it takes to answer several ‘quick questions’, to temper my responses, and set reasonable expectations on my ability to answer them with a high degree of analytical rigor.
4. Data consolidation and cleaning, while time-consuming, can be valuable. One of the first things I did in the Office was put together a master dataset of indicators (and their values) relevant to the ICT sector from several disparate sources (ITU, GSMA, Telegeography etc.) by harmonizing identifiers (country names, ISO codes, income classifications). This custom dataset has proven invaluable for so many tasks over the course of the FY. Doing it manually made me realize the hair-pulling nature of this task — organizations change country names for political reasons and otherwise, and it can be a huge hassle to standardize names across datasets when the ISO codes are unavailable for easy links across datasets. I am glad I invested time and energy into writing that code in R early in the year, and supervising its routine updates.
5. Operational experience can be a useful source of research questions. I found it easier to generate questions on topics that I had worked/engaged on within operations, as opposed to primarily via scanning the literature. I was told several times prior that I have to ‘pick my track’ (research/operations) at the Bank, advice that I eschewed given my inclination to be policy-relevant in my research. One way to do so was to keep my feet firmly on the ground in the day-to-day operational work. In some ways, I’m grateful for my experience with implementing and designing Projects, as I found that the questions I asked were relevant to choices teams faced on the ground regularly. It is indeed hard to do both, but I am glad I had the option to try it, learn from the experience, and come back with more perspective than before.
