Water systems are building blocks for poverty alleviation, shared growth, sustainable development, and green growth strategies. They require data from in-situ observation networks. Budgetary and other constraints have taken a toll on their operation and there are many regions in the world where...

Although the concept of randomized assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century, there was primarily a growing awareness of the need for careful...

This paper applies an innovative method to estimate poverty in India in the absence of recent expenditure data. The method utilizes expenditure data from 2004-05, 2009-10, and 2011-12 to impute household expenditure into a survey of durable goods expenditure conducted in 2014-15. At the USD 1.90...

This paper presents a new family of Stata functions devoted to small area estimation. Small area methods attempt to solve low representativeness of surveys within areas, or the lack of data for specific areas/sub-populations. This is accomplished by incorporating information from outside...

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...

After almost two decades of poverty maps produced by the World Bank and multiple advances in the literature, this paper presents a methodological update to the World Bank's toolkit for small area estimation. The paper reviews the computational procedures of the current methods used by the World...

The increasing growth of forced displacement worldwide has led to the stronger interest of various stakeholders in measuring poverty among refugee populations. However, refugee data remain scarce, particularly in relation to the measurement of income, consumption, or expenditure. This paper...

Small area estimates of poverty and inequality statistics, through survey-to-census imputation that lets consumption be estimated for each and every household in a census, are useful for at least three reasons. First, they can help improve the effectiveness of public spending, by targeting to...

This case study on Colombia describes how the civil registration and national identification system and the health information system have facilitated progress toward universal health coverage. The study includes a description of Colombia's General Social Health Insurance System (Sistema General...

Proxy means test (PMT) poverty targeting tools have become common tools for beneficiary targeting and poverty assessment where full means tests are costly. Currently popular estimation procedures for generating these tools prioritize minimization of in-sample prediction errors; however, the...