Research has provided robust evidence for the use of GPS technology to be the scalable gold standard in land area measurement in household surveys. Nonetheless, facing budget constraints, survey agencies often seek to measure with GPS only plots within a given radius of dwelling locations....

Food consumed outside the home in restaurants or other food establishments is a growing segment of consumption in many developing countries. However, the survey methods that are utilized to collect data on expenditures on food away from home are often simplistic and could potentially result in...

The paper provides evidence of the effects of changes in transport costs on the geographic concentration of industries. The analysis uses micro-level commodity flow data and micro-geographic plant-level data to construct industry-specific ad valorem trucking rates and continuous measures of...

How do international economic agreements influence the investment patterns of firms from emerging economies? This paper studies the ways in which bilateral investment treaties and preferential trade agreements interact with geographic and cultural distance to influence firms' investment...

How does geographic distance affect the impact of trade agreements on bilateral exports, and through what channels? This paper examines this questions in a gravity model context for different types of goods for 185 countries over the period 1965-2010. Three stylized facts emerge. First, although...

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...

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...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals are comprehensive and holistic in nature, encompassing 17 goals and 169 targets covering economic, social, and environmental dimensions of development. Countries face the challenge of translating the Sustainable Development...