Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and...

Monitoring progress towards the World Bank Group's (WBG) goals, eradicating poverty and boosting shared prosperity, is essential to adjust the Bank's portfolio investment decisions and to effectively implement projects. The Poverty and Equity Global Practice has developed a suite of tools to...

To respond effectively to crises, policy makers need reliable, timely evidence on its negative effects and transmission channels. Despite limitations compared to face-to-face surveys, rapid response phone surveys (RRPS) are a cost-effective, flexible method to quickly fill data gaps. This note...

Poverty is an indicator of paramount importance for gauging the socioeconomic well-being of a population. Especially during or after a shock, poverty estimates are invaluable for assessing the severity of the impact and for identifying which parts of the population were most affected. The...

Misreporting is a well-known challenge for researchers in social sciences. This issue is especially prevalent if incentives for misreporting exist, for example, to claim certain benefits or hide illegal behavior. Internally displaced persons are a population that is highly dependent on aid...

Small area poverty maps allow for the design of policies based on spatial differences in welfare. They are typically estimated based on a consumption survey reporting on poverty and a census providing the spatial disaggregation. This paper presents a new method which allows for the estimation of...

Somalia is highly data-deprived, leaving policy makers to operate in a statistical vacuum. To overcome this challenge, the World Bank implemented wave 2 of the Somali High Frequency Survey to better understand livelihoods and vulnerabilities and, especially, to estimate national poverty...

The High Frequency South Sudan Survey, implemented by the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the World Bank, conducted several waves of representative surveys across seven of the ten former states between 2015 and 2017. These surveys provided a long overdue update to...

Understanding the magnitude and importance of income shocks, such as drought or conflict, in causing and perpetuating poverty is critical to designing policies aimed at building resilience and contributing toward the goal of ending poverty. This paper uses micro-data from two waves of the Somali...

Misreporting is a well-known challenge for researchers in social sciences and even more so for policymakers who rely on accurate data to design effective relief strategies. This issue is especially prevalent if incentives for misreporting exist, for example, if there are perceived social or...