This paper explores the methodological differences underlying the construction of the national consumption aggregates that are used to estimate international poverty rates for South Asian countries. The analysis draws on a regional dataset of standardized consumption aggregates to assess the...

How did the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic impact poor households in Sub-Saharan Africa This paper tackles this question by combining 73 High-Frequency Phone Surveys collected by national governments in 14 countries with older nationally representative surveys containing...

This paper assesses the distributional impact of the recent VAT reform in the Philippines and evaluates alternative methods to mitigate the effects of the reform on poor households. The reform was progressive and relatively well targeted. To alleviate the impact of the reform on the poor,...

This paper examines the relationship between health aid and infant mortality, using data from 118 countries between 1973 and 2004. Health aid has a statistically significant effect on infant mortality: doubling per capita health aid is associated with a 2 percent reduction in the infant...

This paper uses household survey data to estimate the incidence of tax and spending programs in Honduras. Any such exercise is fraught with difficulty, so our simplifying assumptions are carefully explained. Rather than look at tax and spending completely independently, we evaluate net incidence...