This paper combines theory with data from different domains to provide an empirical analysis of the scale and variability of social capital as wealth. The analysis is used to argue, given what has been learned from the literature on social capital, that the welfare returns to investing in trust...

This paper presents a model to assess the socioeconomic resilience to natural disasters of an economy, defined as its capacity to mitigate the impact of disaster-related asset losses on welfare, and a tool to help decision makers identify the most promising policy options to reduce welfare...

This paper assesses inequality of opportunity in educational achievement using the Human Opportunity Index methodology on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment. The findings suggest that there are large inequalities in learning outcomes as measured by demonstrated...

Using Life in Transition Survey data for 27 transition countries, the findings of this paper suggest that higher life satisfaction is correlated with lesser experience of unpleasant events such as labor market shock or economic distress, mostly in the recent past. Social capital such as trust,...

Governance indicators are now widely used as tools for conducting development dialogue, allocating external assistance, and influencing foreign direct investment. This paper argues that available governance indicators are not suitable for these purposes as they do not conceptualize governance...

In 2013, the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank Group endorsed two ambitious goals: eliminating extreme poverty in the world by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity. The latter is defined as fostering the growth in the income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each...

The proportion of Ugandan households living in poverty reduced by more than half between 1993 and 2013. Using household survey data, this paper analyzes nonmonetary dimensions of poverty in Uganda for levels and trends, to explore whether the observed reduction in monetary-based poverty are...

Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. This paper proposes an expanded risk assessment based on a framework that adds socioeconomic resilience and uses wellbeing losses as its main measure of disaster severity. Using a new,...

Do World Bank policy loans that are focused on social policy reform help improve social policies and institutions in borrower countries? To help answer this question, this paper provides new empirical evidence of the association between World Bank policy lending and measures of the quality of...

The number of countries that regularly participate in international large-scale assessments has increased sharply over the past 15 years, with the share of countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment growing from one-fifth of countries in 2000 to over one-third...