In recent decades, economic growth in the Dominican Republic (DR) has been steady. However, growth has not occurred in such a way as to make the benefits widely and evenly available. In fact, although the DR economy grew faster than that of other LAC countries before the Covid-19 pandemic, its...

Poor households often rely on transfers from their social networks for consumption smoothing, yet there is limited evidence on how antipoverty programs affect informal transfers. This paper exploits the randomized rollout of BRAC's ultra-poor graduation program in Bangladesh and panel data...

This poverty diagnostic reviews welfare outcomes in the Islamic Republic of Iran between 2011 and 2020, with a focus on poverty and shared prosperity. Iran is the only country in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) that collects high quality household budget survey data on an annual...

Ghana administers multiple social protection programs. One, pensions provided by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust, has a long history, but the rest of the programs have been introduced and expanded over the past two decades. This study assesses the performance of the government...

This edition of the Macro Poverty Outlooks periodical contains country-by-country forecasts and overviews for GDP, fiscal, debt and poverty indicators for the developing countries of the South Asia region. Macroeconomic indicators such as population, gross domestic product and gross domestic...

The Adaptive Social Protection for Increased Resilience project (ASPIRE or PSARA for its acronym in French), financed by The World Bank and implemented by the government of Haiti, aims to design and implement a cash transfer program for vulnerable households in Haiti, with a focus on increasing...

This report seeks to support the GoTL in its efforts to build an Adaptive Social Protection (ASP) system. It aims at enhancing knowledge and understanding of ASP and assessing the country's current capacity to provide agile responses to shocks and building resilience. The ASP assessment follows...

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...

Are global incomes converging or diverging Despite recent empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis of unconditional beta convergence, this paper argues that such findings overlook the stark reality facing the world's poorest people. Many lower income countries, including those among the...

Close to half of the population of Afghanistan was living below the national poverty line prior to the regime change in August 2021, with no additional information on poverty collected in the country since the last official household survey in 2019/20. This paper fills this knowledge gap through...