Can mass public health messages change behavior during a crisis? This paper assesses the impact of a COVID-19 focused text-messaging campaign launched in May 2020 with the Ministry of Health and Social Protection of Tajikistan to encourage compliance with risk reduction measures. The initiative...

The authors build a new database of highly spatially disaggregated indicators related to risk and resilience to the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Uzbekistan. The outbreak disproportionately affects groups, the elderly, the poor, those living in areas under lockdown, and...

Kazakhstan's cities are hubs of economic opportunity and prosperity. But despite the government's ambitious targets, the pace of urbanization remains slow. This study focuses on two key constraints: (i) the very high cost of living in Kazakhstan's cities, and (ii) the near absence of a rental...

Uzbekistan has one of the lowest rates of internal migration in the world, leading to persistent economic imbalances. Drawing from a unique monthly panel survey called Listening to the Citizens of Uzbekistan and a survey experiment, this paper focuses on two factors that prevent domestic...

As one of the most pivotal ways that labor markets adjust to changing economic conditions, international migration is never far from the center of the national discussion in Uzbekistan. This paper summarizes the relationship between recent international migration trends and household well-being...

Rapid economic growth over the past two decades lifted millions of people out of poverty in Central Asia. But the uneven spread of prosperity left many communities struggling to catch up. To support lagging regions within countries, each of the region's five national governments has made...

This paper studies the effect of proposing a monetary incentive for vaccination intentions, with a survey-based randomized controlled experiment conducted separately in three countries, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Respondents from nationally representative surveys were randomly...

Access to reliable electricity is a Sustainable Development Goal, and key for both economic growth and individual wellbeing. Yet, in the absence of sophisticated monitoring systems, policy makers in developing countries commonly rely on surveys to measure electricity reliability and prioritize...

This study demonstrates systematic bias against women in public perceptions of the fairness of wages. In nationally representative survey experiments across more than 70,000 individual vignettes posed to 4,500 respondents in three Central Asian countries, respondents were 13 percent more likely...