Against the background of high inflation, climate shocks, and concerns about rising food insecurity, this study documents the state of economic sentiments and expectations of households in five African countries-Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda-that are home to 36 percent of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created urgent demand for timely data, leading to a surge in mobile phone surveys for tracking the impacts of and responses to the pandemic. This paper assesses, and attempts to mitigate, selection biases in individual-level analyses based on phone survey data. The...

Data produced by the public sector can have transformational impacts on development outcomes through better targeting of resources, improved service delivery, cost savings in policy implementation, increased accountability, and more. Around the world, the amount of data produced by the public...

This paper assesses the relationship between the length of recall and nonrandom error in agricultural survey data. Using data from the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture in Malawi and Tanzania, the paper shows that key input and output variables...

Somalia is highly data-deprived, leaving policy makers to operate in a statistical vacuum. To overcome this challenge, the World Bank implemented wave 2 of the Somali High Frequency Survey to better understand livelihoods and vulnerabilities and, especially, to estimate national poverty...

Understanding the magnitude and importance of income shocks, such as drought or conflict, in causing and perpetuating poverty is critical to designing policies aimed at building resilience and contributing toward the goal of ending poverty. This paper uses micro-data from two waves of the Somali...

Between 2014 and 2016 unprecedented and consecutive climatic shocks ravaged Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. The largest ever emergency relief operation in the country’s history ensued. The pathways and extent to which the humanitarian response protected livelihoods remain...

Traditional per capita measures of poverty assign the same poverty status to individuals living in the same household and overlook differences in living standards within households. There has been a long-standing need for a tool that enables poverty measurement at the individual level, while...

The disutility of work, often summarily described as effort, is a primal component of economic models of worker and consumer behavior. However, empirical applications that measure effort, especially those that assess the distribution of effort across known populations, are historically scarce....

With the surge in publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery, satellite-based monitoring of smallholder agricultural outcomes is gaining momentum. This paper provides recommendations on how large-scale household surveys should be conducted to generate the data needed to train models...