In their productive capacity, assets generate income and facilitate access to capital and credit. In the face of shocks, they enhance the ability to diversify income and alleviate liquidity constraints (Hulme and Shepherd, 2003; Carter and Barrett, 2006). Ownership of, and control over assets is a...

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....

Does the same question asked of the same population yield the same answer in face-to-face interviews when other parts of the questionnaire are altered? If not, what would be the implications for proxy-based poverty measurement? Relying on a randomized household survey experiment implemented in...

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 are...

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...

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...

High resolution datasets of population density which accurately map sparsely distributed human populations do not exist at a global scale. Typically, population data is obtained using censuses and statistical modeling. More recently, methods using remotely-sensed data have emerged, capable of...

Off-farm income constitutes a significant share of the household livelihood portfolios across Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the determinants and dynamics of individuals' participation in off-farm employment activities have not received adequate attention due to the weaknesses in individual-level data...

Based on a two-round household panel survey conducted in Eastern Uganda, this study shows that the analysis of the inverse scale-productivity relationship is highly sensitive to how plot-level maize production, hence yield (production divided by GPS-based plot area), is measured. Although...