While female labor force participation (LFP) in Iran is among the lowest in the world, there is hardly any study on the COVID-19 pandemic effects on the country's female LFP. We find that female LFP decreased during the pandemic years by around 1 percentage point in 2021 and 2022. When...

Monitoring soil quality provides indispensable inputs for effective policy advice, but very few poorer countries can implement high-quality surveys on soil. We offer an alternative, low-cost imputation-based approach to generating various soil quality indicators. The estimation results validate...

In many countries, large differences in poverty persist at the subnational level. In addition, global challenges such as climate change, fragility, economic crises, and food insecurity are often trans-border issues that pose significant risks for poverty reduction both across and within...

While urbanization has great potential to facilitate poverty reduction, climate shocks represent a looming threat to such upward mobility. This paper empirically analyzes the effects of climatic risks on the function of urban agglomerations to support poor households to escape from poverty....

We propose a new approach to develop vulnerability lines that are explicitly anchored to the idea of a sub-set of the population at risk of falling into poverty. We suggest that lines developed in this way can also be applied for the purpose of identifying the middle class (or “secure”). We...

Given its modest position as a lower-middle income country, Vietnam stands out from the rest of the world with its remarkable performance on standardized test scores, school enrollment, and completed years of schooling. We provide an overview of the factors behind this exemplary performance both...

Russia offers the unique example of a centrally planned economy swiftly transforming itself into a market-oriented economy. We offer a comprehensive study of inequality and mobility patterns for Russia, using multiple rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Surveys over the past two...

Vietnam has one of the fastest economic growth rates in the world in recent years. However, ethnic groups in this country may not equally share the benefit of this wealth increase. Using data from household surveys in Vietnam, this paper offers an analysis of the welfare outcomes between ethnic...