Dr Katsushi Imai is Reader in Economics at the Department of Economics, School of Social Sciences. Katsushi joined the University of Manchester in September 2004.     

[See Katsushi's personal website for more details, including the links to recent working papers.] 

He has served as a research lead of the Development Economics Research Area Group (2013-2022) and a programme director of MSc Development Economics and Policy (2011-present). He graduated with BA (Econ) from Univ. of Tokyo, an MSc from LSE, an MSc from Oxford and a DPhil (Econ) from the University of Oxford. Since then he taught at Oxford as a post-doctoral fellow at CSAE and Senior Associate Member at St. Antony's College, and at Royal Holloway, the University of London as Lecturer in Economics, before joining Manchester in 2004. Kat regularly works for the IFAD, the United Nations as a consultant to assist its policymaking. Kat is also an associate fellow at SIID. 

Katsushi serves as a co-editor of Review of Development Economics and an editorial board member for Development Studies Research and Asian Development Perspective.   

He has served as an external examiner for the University of Sussex (2020-24, MSc Economics & MSc Development Economics) and the University of East Anglia (2017-2021, MSc Impact Evaluation for International Development). Katsushi obtained a certificate for external examiners from Advanced HE in May 2021 at Sussex. 

Katsushi specialises in applied econometric works on India and other countries (e.g. Nepal, Kenya). He has published widely on inequality and poverty - including multidimensional poverty -, risk and vulnerability of households, child and adult nutrition and evaluations of public policies, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), microfinance programmes and conditional cash transfers. 

Katsushi is also interested in the role of agriculture - broadly defined to include agricultural development, productivity improvement and institutions and how this contributes to achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 2.  He is also interested in and has worked on SDG5 (gender equality), and SDG10 (reduced inequalities).

See Katsushi's publications. 

See Katsushi's interest in areas of PhD supervision. 

Specific research interests:

Keywords: Inequality, Poverty, MDP (Multidimensional Poverty), Nutrition, Vulnerability and Risk, Malnutrition, Household Data, Panel Data Econometrics,  Asia, Public Policy and Programme Evaluation

Katsushi is interested in clarifying the risk-coping mechanism of households or individuals in rural areas and its effect in their welfare over time. For example, he has investigated in depth the role of public work schemes (e.g. Employment Guarantee Scheme) for wage workers in reducing their risks as an application of real options theory. Katsushi is also interested in measuring the vulnerability of households to aggregate or idiosyncratic shocks faced by households. He has also worked on inequality and poverty in various forms with a focus on their dynamics and underlying causes using various methods, mainly applying micro econometric models to large household datasets.  

Another research interest of Katsushi is to evaluate public policies by applying various micro-econometric models to large household data sets. Amongst other econometric issues, He has been particularly focusing on the endogeneity and self-selection problems associated with participation in the programmes.

Current research projects:

Katsushi was a CoI in the GCRF research grant (£9.0m) entitled 'DAMS 2.0: Design and assessment of resilient and sustainable interventions in water-energy-food environment Mega-systems. He carries out economic analyses for the project.   

Katsushi has mainly worked on the following research projects. First, he has worked on the project entitled, ‘Nutrition Traps, Workfare and PDS (Public Distribution System) in India’(with Raghbendra Jha (Australian National University), and Raghav Gaiha (Harvard University & the University of Delhi) funded by AUSAID and Australian Social Science Research Council. As an extension, he has tested in the ESRC project whether there existed nutrition-based traps using large household data. Second, Katsushi has been involved in a project which measures household-level vulnerability and malnutrition. See Katsushi's personal webpage for more details.

Katsushi was involved in the research project funded by IFAD, the UN and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF), the Government of LAO PDR to help establish an independent think tank with the capacity to guide the country towards economic prosperity and better nutrition (with Dr Samuel Annim, a Professor at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana and an external associate of BWPI).

Katsushi worked on the ESRC-funded project entitled ‘On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India’ funded by the ESRC (as a principal investigator, 1st July 2010- 30th December 2011, £59,473).

• Research Grants: 

Katsushi is a CoI for the GCRF research grant (£9.0m) entitled 'DAMS 2.0: Design and assessment of resilient and sustainable interventions in water-energy-food environment Mega-systems.

He obtained the HKUST-UoM Seed grant to network with HKUST- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (£10K, Feb 2018-Dec 2018). 

See Katsushi's personal web page for more details.

Katsushi is interested in supervising a student who is willing to work on micro-econometrics using large household survey data in developing countries, at least, as a part of the dissertation. 

Possible topics include: 

A. Empirical Analysis of Nutrition, Health and Vulnerability

B. Impact Evaluations of Public Policies 

C. Poverty, including MDP (multi-dimensional poverty)

D. Inequality 

E. Food Security and Nutrition

F. Health 

G. Risk-coping Behaviour of Households 

H. Role of Agriculture (and its structural changes) and Structural Transformation of Rural Sector

See Katsushi's personal web page for more details.