Crime rates in Papua New Guinea's capital city of Port Moresby are among the highest in the world. Few youth work, and good jobs are scarce. In 2013, the National Capital District Commission partnered with the World Bank to implement the Urban Youth Employment Project. The project offers...

This paper examines how different types of workers in seventeen middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Average employment growth slowed dramatically, particularly for wage and industrial sector workers, with corresponding increases in...

Although Sri Lanka has made significant progress in social and economic development over the past decade, the Northern and Eastern provinces that faced the brunt of the decades-long conflict remain disproportionately poor. To understand the labor market dimensions of poverty in these regions,...

This paper explores the methodological differences underlying the construction of the national consumption aggregates that are used to estimate international poverty rates for all countries in the South Asia region, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and...

This paper intends to inform the effort of the Sri Lankan government to reform the targeting efficacy of its social protection programs, in particular, Samurdhi, which currently distributes benefits based on self-reported income. The paper develops a proxy means test for Sri Lanka based on the...

Country-level census data are typically collected once every 10 years. However, conflict, migration, urbanization, and natural disasters can cause rapid shifts in local population patterns. This study uses Sri Lankan data to demonstrate the feasibility of a bottom-up method that combines...

This paper examines the public sector wage premium using nationally representative household surveys from 91 countries. The public sector generally pays a wage premium compared to all private sector salaried employees, but the size of the premium is sensitive to the choice of the private sector...

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 $1.90...

This paper uses household surveys from 89 countries to estimate the rate of extreme poverty among children in the developing world. The estimates are based on the same surveys and welfare measures as official World Bank poverty estimates. Of children under age 18 years, 19.5 percent are...

This paper presents a new demographic profile of extreme and moderate poverty, defined as those living on less than $1.90 and between $1.90 and $3.10 per day in 2013, based on household survey data from 89 developing countries. The face of poverty is primarily rural and young; 80 percent of the...