The challenges associated with poverty measurement with a cardinal variable have received due attention during the last four decades, but there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable. This paper first proposes a class of simple, intuitive...

The international development community has used the World Bank's Statistical Capacity Index since its inception in 2004. The Sustainable Development Goals create new challenges for national statistical systems to produce high-quality and internationally comparable data. This paper reviews...

The paper formalizes and tests the hypothesis that greater exposure to big shocks induces stronger societal responses for adaptation and protection from future big shocks. Support for this hypothesis is found in various strands of the literature and in new empirical tests using cross-country...

This paper analyzes the reopening process of countries in Europe and Central Asia after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides evidence on the effects of different reopening trajectories and their timing and speed on economic recovery. The analysis indicates that countries that...

The size of the economic shocks triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of the associated non-pharmaceutical interventions have not been fully assessed, because the official economic indicators have not been published. This paper provides estimates of the economic impacts of the...

Citizens have a right to accept any job offer in their country, but that right is not marketable or automatically extended to foreigners. Yet, some citizens have useful things to do if they could rent out their right-to-work, and there are foreigners who would value the new options for...

The authors describe trends in single parenthood in Russia, examining factors that affect living arrangements in single-mother families. Before economic reform, single mothers and their children were somewhat protected form poverty by government assistance (income support, subsidized child care,...

The authors model the household demand for child care, the mother's participation in the labor force, and her working hours in Romania. Their model estimates the effects of the price of child care, the mother's wage, and household income on household behavior relating to child care and mothers...

In theory, it is possible that the persistent poverty that has emerged in many transition economies, is attributable to underlying, non-convexities in the dynamics of household incomes - such that a vulnerable household will never recover from a sufficiently large, but short-lived shock to its...

The authors argue that the welfare inferences drawn from subjective answers to questions on qualitative surveys are clouded by concerns about the structure of measurement errors and how latent psychological factors influence observed respondent characteristics. They propose a panel data model to...