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...

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...

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...

The COVID-19 outbreak has brought unprecedented disruptions to the global economies and has led to income loss and high unemployment rates. But scant, if any, evidence exists on gender gaps in economic outcomes such as income, expenditure, savings, and job loss in a multi-country setting. We...

Despite a rich literature studying the impact of inequality on policy outcomes, there has been limited effort to bring these insights into the debates about comparative support for government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We fill in this gap by analyzing rich survey data from six countries...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recently adopted by the United Nations represent an important step to identify shared global goals for development over the next two decades. Yet, the stated goals are not as straightforward and easy to interpret as they appear on the surface. Review of...

Few studies currently exist on the long-term impacts of schooling policies in developing countries. We examine the impacts — half a century later — of a mass education program conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the occupied areas during the First Indochina War (1946-1954)....

Despite a growing literature on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, scant evidence currently exists on its impacts on air quality. We offer the first study that provides cross-national evidence on the causal impacts of COVID-19 on air pollution. We assemble a rich database consisting of daily,...

This paper investigates a women's self-help group program with more than 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural areas of Northern India. The program has four streams of activity in micro-savings, agricultural enterprise training, health and nutrition education, and political...

This paper studies welfare dynamics, especially changes associated with middle-class status in Arab countries. In the absence of panel data, we employ state-of-the-art synthetic panel techniques using repeated cross sections of expenditure data from household surveys and subjective wellbeing...