Abdoul Wahid Massaoudou Namata

Economist and quantitative scientist in development economics, Bayesian time-series forecasting and causal impact evaluation. Turns unstructured administrative data into reliable statistics to help institutions make better-informed decisions, for the World Bank, the Government of Quebec and university research departments. Analyzes each decision-maker’s needs and generates the hypotheses to test, mines multiple data sources, quantitative and qualitative, inspects and adjusts their quality, and engineers the features the models need. Then leverages econometrics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop, evaluate and run predictive models, and communicates the results through clear presentations and data visualizations that influence decision-making.

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. From September 2025 to September 2026 I was President of the Graduate Students’ Association in Economics at UQAM, organising academic events and managing the association’s budget.