The international development community has used the World Bank's Statistical Capacity Index since its inception in 2004. The Sustainable Development Goals create new challenges for national statistical systems to produce high-quality and internationally comparable data. This paper reviews...

We analyse the Indian National Sample Survey data spanning the period 1987/88-2011/12 to uncover patterns of transition into and out of different classes of consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income growth has accelerated, accompanied by accelerating poverty decline. Underlying...

This study explores the short-run transitions between poverty, vulnerability, and middle class, using synthetic panels constructed from multiple rounds of Colombia's Integrated Household Survey (in Spanish Gran Encuesta Integrada de Hogares). The paper reports results from two approaches to...

A country's statistical capacity takes an indispensable part in its development. We offer a comprehensive comparison between the World Bank's Statistical Performance Indicators and Index (SPI) and its predecessor, the Statistical Capacity Index (SCI) regarding different conceptual and empirical...

Ghana has managed to consistently keep its poverty rate lower than the regional average over the past 25 years, but this positive trend slowed down recently. We investigate the dynamics of overall, moderate, and extreme poverty in Ghana during 2005/06-2016/17, addressing the lack of actual panel...

Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper we build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data can allow...

Household consumption surveys do not typically cover refugee populations, and poverty estimates for refugees are rare. This paper tests the performance of cross-survey imputation methods to estimate poverty for a sample of refugees in Chad, by combining United Nations High Commissioner for...

Vietnam is widely praised for its successful fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The country has had an extremely low mortality rate of 35 deaths to date (out of a population of approximately 100 million) and currently has no community transmission. We offer the first study that examines the...

Household consumption or income surveys do not typically cover refugee populations. In the rare cases where refuges are included, inconsistencies between different data sources could interfere with comparable poverty estimates. We test the performance of a recently developed cross-survey...