Abdoul Wahid Massaoudou Namata

Data scientist and quantitative analyst in development economics, Bayesian time-series forecasting and causal impact evaluation. Turns unstructured administrative data into statistics an institution can act on, for the World Bank among others. Works in machine learning and applied econometrics across the whole chain: securing the data, designing the identification strategy, and writing up the result for the person who has to decide on it.

I am currently a Research Consultant with the Development Impact Group (DIME), Development Economics, at the World Bank Group, working on national labour markets in Liberia and The Gambia, built from tax, payroll and business-registry systems. At the Chair in Macroeconomics and Forecasting at ESG UQAM I built a daily index of Canadian business conditions, 10,804 values from 1997 to 2026, and the monthly Bayesian Qual-VAR recession forecast at horizons of one to twelve months. At CIRANO I measured the tail of fifty-five years of Quebec budget forecast errors and turned it into a provisioning rule for the government. Earlier, at Orange Innovation in Paris, I designed the impact evaluation of the group’s social offers.

I am completing an MSc in Economics (quantitative) at ESG UQAM in Montreal, with a thesis on forecasting Canadian recessions. I hold a Master’s in Development Economics and a Magistère from CERDI, University of Clermont Auvergne, both with honours, and a BSc in Economics and Management from Hassan II University in Casablanca, also with honours.

Beyond the work

Outside research I play basketball and football, and I am a long-time chess player: the habits of long-term planning transfer more than you would expect. I am President of the Graduate Students’ Association in Economics at UQAM, where I organise academic events and manage the association’s budget.