Vietnam is widely regarded as a success story for its impressive economic growth and poverty reduction in the last few decades. Yet, recent evidence indicates that the country's economic growth has not been uniform. Compiling and analyzing new extensive province-level data from the Vietnam...

Hardly any recent study exists that broadly reviews poverty trends over time for Russia. Analyzing the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Surveys between 1994 and 2019, we offer an updated review of poverty trends and dynamics for the country over the past quarter of century. We find that poverty...

We investigate the impact of a large-scale poverty alleviation program targeted at 62 poorest districts in Vietnam, analyzing multiple datasets spanning the past 20 years with a regression discontinuity design with district fixed effects. While we do not find significant program effects on...

Ghana has managed to consistently keep its poverty rate lower than the regional average over the past 25 years, but this positive trend slowed down recently. We investigate the dynamics of overall, moderate, and extreme poverty in Ghana during 2005/06-2016/17, addressing the lack of actual panel...

Russia offers the unique example of a leading centrally planned economy swiftly transforming itself into a market-oriented economy. We offer a comprehensive study of inequality and mobility patterns for Russia, using multiple rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Surveys over the past...

In communities highly dependent on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods, the common occurrence of climatic shocks can lower the marginal cost of a child and raise fertility. We test this hypothesis using longitudinal data from Madagascar. Exploiting exogenous within-district year-to-year...

Measuring poverty trends and dynamics is an important undertaking for poverty reduction policies, which is further highlighted by the SDG goal 1 on eradicating poverty by 2030. We provide abroad overview of the pros and cons of poverty imputation indata-scarce environments, update recent review...

Household consumption data are often unavailable, not fully collected, or incomparable over time in poorer countries. Survey-to-survey imputation has been increasingly employed to address these data gaps for poverty measurement, but its effective use requires standardized protocols. We refine...

Household consumption or income surveys do not typically cover refugee populations. In the rare cases where refugees are included, inconsistencies between different data sources could interfere with comparable poverty estimates. We test the performance of a recently developed cross-survey...

Existing data are severely insufficient for monitoring progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly for poorer countries. While we should continue efforts to produce new, high-quality data, this approach seems not feasible for all poorer countries. We call for a more...