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...

According to the official statistics published by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda, the country registered a decline in poverty from 46 percent in 2010/11 to 39 percent in 2013/14. This declining poverty trend was broadly debated and repeatedly questioned in national and...

Telephone surveys enable us to collect data in a cost-effective and timely manner, but may not be conducive for collecting detailed consumption or income data for measuring poverty due to the required length of the interview and complexity of the questions. Combining telephone surveys with a...

Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of assets or property) and...

This paper is the first to systematically test the robustness of shared prosperity estimates to different methodological choices using a sample of countries from all regions in the world. The tests that are conducted include grouped versus microdata, nominal welfare aggregate versus adjustment...

The Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty from its 1990 level will be achieved in 2015, and the international development community is now moving to a new goal of ?ending extreme poverty.? However, the data needed to monitor progress remain severely limited....

This paper proposes diagnostics to assess the accuracy of survey-to-survey imputation methods and applies them to examine why imputing from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey into the Labor Force Survey fails to accurately project poverty trends in Sri Lanka between 2006 and 2009....

The World Bank has recently adopted a target of reducing the proportion of population living below US$1.25 a day at 2005 international prices to 3 percent by 2030. This paper reviews different projection methods and estimates the global poverty rate of 2030 modifying Ravallion (2013)'s approach...

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank's twin...

On October 15, 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim announced the World Bank Group?s commitment to support the 78 poorest countries to implement a multi-topic household survey every three years between 2016 and 2030, for monitoring progress toward ending extreme poverty and boosting...