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В статье на основе оценок трех профилей бедности, рассчитанных на данных выборочных обследований, предлагается методика получения комплексной оценки бедности, которая является решением модели латентно-структурного анализа с бинарными классами. В обследованиях РиДМиЖ, РЛМС ВШЭ, ОБДХ присутствуют вопросы, ответы на которые характеризуют разные профили бедности—экономический профиль, депривационный и субъективный. Последний представляет субъективное ощущение своего материального положения на шкале уровня жизни. Оценки, полученные по трем профилям, измеряют разные стороны бедности, однако не ясно насколько они согласованы между собой, и существует ли латентная бедность, которая статистически отражается в них. На базе модели латентно-структурного анализа можно получить утвердительный или отрицательный ответ на этот вопрос. В случае утвердительного ответа в качестве комплексной оценки бедности предлагается принять вероятность латентной бедности. В статье приведены результаты конкретных расчетов для трёх групп домохозяйств: пенсионеров, трудоспособных и смешанных семей, состоящих из пенсионеров и трудоспособных. На данных самого большого обследования Росстата ВНДН получены оценки латентной бедности для городского и сельского населения России, домохозяйств с разным количеством детей. Показано, что латентная бедность и согласованность для разных групп населения не противоречат содержательным представлениям об этом явлении. Выявлено, что заниженный уровень прожиточного минимума (граница абсолютной бедности) приводит к нарушению согласованности трех оценок для домохозяйств пенсионеров. В этом случае ощущение бедности и уровень лишений плохо согласуются с экономической оценкой бедности., On the basis of estimating three poverty profiles calculated on sample surveys data, the article presents the methods for obtaining an integrated poverty measure, which solves the model of latent structural analysis with binary classes. In such surveys as Parents and Children, Men and Women in Family, HSE Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, Russian Household Budget Survey, there are questions characterizing different profiles of poverty—economic, deprivation and subjective. The last-mentioned profile presents a subjective perception of one’s position on the scale of living standards. Estimates by the three profiles measure different sides of poverty, but it is not clear how they are harmonized, and whether latent poverty is statistically reflected in them. The model of the latent structural analysis may give a positive or negative answer to this question. In case of the positive answer it is proposed to take the probability of latent poverty as an integrated poverty measure. The article provides the results of calculations for three groups of households: those of pensioners, of able-bodied persons, and mixed households consisting of pensioners and the able-bodied. On the data from the largest Rosstat survey—Statistical Survey of Income and Participation in Social Programs (VNDN) were made estimates of latent poverty for urban and rural population of Russia, for households with different number of children. It shows that latent poverty and coherence of different population groups are not contrary to the meaningful views on the phenomenon. It is found out that the understated size of the subsistence minimum (absolute poverty line) leads to lack of coherence between three estimates for households of pensioners. In this case, feeling of poverty and deprivation levels are not in line with the economic estimation of poverty.

In 2013, the World Bank Group announced two goals that would guide its operations worldwide. The first is the eradication of chronic extreme poverty -- bringing the number of extremely poor people, defined as those living on less than 1.25 ppp-adjusted dollars a day, to less than 3% of the world population by 2030. The second is the boosting of shared prosperity, defined as promoting the growth of per capita real income of the poorest 40% of the population in each country. Last year, UN member nations agreed in New York to a set of post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), the first and foremost of which is the eradication of extreme poverty everywhere, in all its forms. Both the language and the spirit of the SDG objective reflect the growing acceptance of the idea that poverty is a multi-dimensional concept that reflects multiple deprivations in various aspects of well-being. That said, there is much less agreement on the best ways in which those deprivations should be measured; and on whether or how information on them should be aggregated. This report advises the Bank on the measurement and monitoring of global poverty on two areas: • What should be the interpretation of the definition of extreme poverty, set in 2015 in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)-adjusted dollars a day per person? • What choices should the World Bank make regarding complementary monetary and non-monetary poverty measures to be tracked and made available to policy-makers? The World Bank plays an important role in shaping the global debate on combatting poverty, and the indicators and data the Bank collates and makes available shape opinion and actual policies in client countries, and, to a certain extent, in all countries. How we answer the above questions can therefore have a major influence on the global economy.

Uganda’s progress in reducing poverty from 1993 to 2006 is a remarkable story of success that has been well told. The narrative of Uganda’s continued, albeit it slightly slower, progress in reducing poverty since 2006 is less familiar. This was a period in which growth slowed as the gains from reforms years earlier had been fully realized, and weak infrastructure and increasing corruption increasingly constrained private sector competitiveness (World Bank 2015). This report examines Uganda’s progress in reducing poverty, with a specific focus on the period 2006 to 2013. The report shows that high growth from 2006 to 2010 benefited poverty reduction. Before turning in further detail to the key findings of the report, it is important to note that the analysis undertaken in this report is only possible because the Government of Uganda has invested in a high quality series of household surveys to document progress in wellbeing since 1993. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics has conducted high-quality household surveys that every three to four years that have provided a comparable series of data on poverty and other household characteristics for the last twenty years. Uganda is one of the few countries in the region to have achieved this level of comparable, frequent poverty monitoring over time. Without this, it would not be possible to document the lessons Uganda provides.

This paper proposes and illustrates a methodology to assess the economic cost of the sovereign risk finance instruments available to the Government of Ethiopia and its development partners for financing the shock-responsive scalability component of the Productive Safety Net Programme. The methodology involves: (i) specifying rules for when additional expenditures would be triggered in each woreda; (ii) specifying alternative risk finance strategies; and (iii) analyzing the costs of each risk financing strategy, including sensitivity and scenario testing of the results. The methodology is applied to a hypothetical set of rules for drought-responsive scalability, and a range of potential risk finance strategies.

The rural economy in Bangladesh has been a powerful source of economic growth and has substantially reduced poverty, especially since 2000, but the remarkable transformation and unprecedented dynamism in rural Bangladesh are an underexplored, underappreciated, and largely untold story. The analysis identifies the key changes occurring in the rural economy, the principal drivers of rural incomes, the implications for policy, and related actions to foster future growth, further reduce poverty, and improve food security and nutrition. A substantial strength of this study is its empirical foundation, consisting of three sets of detailed data on rural households. Two of the datasets are unique in tracking the same set of households for more than two decades. These data make it possible to examine how change is occurring within and among rural households; they shed considerable light on trends that tend to be obscured at more aggregate levels of analysis. Nationally representative surveys and aggregate secondary data provide complementary and contextually rich insights into the household data.

Moldova has experienced rapid economic growth in the past decade, which has been accompanied by reductions in poverty and good performance in shared prosperity. Nonetheless, Moldova remains one of the poorest countries in Europe and faces challenges in sustaining the progress. The challenges for progress include spatial and cross-group inequalities, particularly because of unequal access to assets, services and economic opportunities. Moreover, strengthening the persistently weak labor markets to boost employment, especially in the nonfarm sectors, is critical for sustaining progress toward the twin goals of reducing poverty and expanding shared prosperity and for addressing the problems associated with an aging population in a fiscally responsible manner. Accordingly, ensuring the viability of the pension system and improving social assistance are necessary areas of reform, particularly in a context of fiscal pressures, the aging population, and the great vulnerability of the poor to shocks. The Moldova poverty assessment 2016 includes three prongs of analysis: this report, which explores trends and the drivers of poverty and shared prosperity, and the accompanying analyses, ‘a jobs diagnostic for Moldova’ and ‘structural transformation of Moldovan small-holder agriculture and its poverty and shared prosperity impacts.’ The jobs diagnostic explores the main labor demand and supply challenges in Moldova in more detail, while the analysis of structural transformation focuses on the agricultural sector and whether it can become a driver of progress.

This brief is based on analysis of the 2011-12 household budget survey (HBS) implemented by Central Administration for Statistics (CAS) with technical assistance from the World Bank. The survey was conducted during the period of September 2011 to November 2012, and was stratified across nine regions. The sample was designed to cover 4,805 households, but due to high non-response, it only includes 2,476 participating households. Poverty numbers presented in this note are not comparable with poverty estimates for other years due to differences in the instruments, fieldwork implementation and to some extent sample design; and also due to differences in the methodology for constructing welfare aggregate and the poverty line. All regional estimates in this report should be viewed with caution given concerns about significant levels of nonresponse and relatively small sample sizes within regions. CAS and the World Bank are working together to improve the quality of future surveys.

Measuring poverty requires adjusting nominal consumption (or income) into a real value of consumption, across geographic areas and over time. To this end, data on consumer prices are used to construct a price index. There are a range of approaches to do this, from using the consumer price index, to survey-based unit values, which differ in the underlying sources of price data and methodologies for indexing. These different approaches can have large impacts on poverty measures and trends. Surprisingly little attention has been focused on this topic. This study reviews a range of issues and the evidence on how prices matter for measuring poverty, particularly in Africa. It draws on a wide literature, much from developed countries, and offers suggestions for future work in this area.

This paper provides an overview of poverty and well-being trends in India since the mid-1990s. Poverty reduction since 2005 has been much faster than the earlier decade, as a result of broad-based growth across most geographic areas. Underlying this is a pattern of high mobility in economic status that has led to an emerging middle class. Still, a vast (and rising) share of the population faces significant risk of slipping back into poverty. India's poor are increasingly concentrated in low-income states with historically lower rates of economic progress. Even as India has reduced poverty faster than the developing world as a whole, the degree of poverty reduction associated with growth has been substantially lower than in some of its middle-income peers. India faces important challenges in nonmonetary dimensions of welfare as well. Despite success on important fronts, such as infant and child mortality and secondary education, progress has been slow in others, such as sanitation and nutrition, and lags behind some other countries that are at a similar stage of development.

This paper contributes to the methodological literature on the estimation of poverty lines for country poverty comparisons in Latin America and the Caribbean. The paper exploits a unique, comprehensive data set of 86 up-to-date urban official extreme and moderate poverty lines across 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the recent values of the national purchasing power parity conversion factors from the 2011 International Comparison Program and a set of harmonized household surveys that are part of the Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean project. Because of the dispersion of country-specific poverty lines, the paper concludes that the value of a regional poverty line largely depends on the selected aggregation method, which ends up having a direct impact on the estimation of regional extreme and moderate poverty headcounts.

This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) identifies the binding constraints to reducing extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity in Ethiopia. Achieving those goals requires a two pronged strategy of building on the strengths of past performance as well as introducing new elements. Progress in rural livelihoods drove poverty reduction in the past and will likely do so in the future. In addition, faster, and more inclusive, private sector-led structural change and ‘getting urbanization right’ are essential going forward. The report identifies two key challenges to sustainable progress: Ethiopia needs sustainably financed infrastructure that enables private investment to flourish and reduces reliance on public borrowing. It must also strengthen feedback mechanisms that inform policymakers of what works and what doesn’t so that the aspirations of a rapidly rising and better-educated working-age population can be met. The report is structured in two parts: Part A analyses the past and Part B identifies priorities for the future.

World Bank's international poverty line of $1.90/day, at 2011 purchasing power parity, is based on a collection of national poverty lines, which were originally used to set the international poverty line of $1.25/day at 2005 purchasing power parity. This paper proposes an approach for estimating a more recent, complete, and comparable collection of national poverty thresholds from reported national poverty rates. The paper presents a set of international poverty lines based on this new database of national poverty lines. In contrast to the lines used to estimate the $1.90 international poverty line, this approach produces national poverty lines that are (1) consistent with national poverty rates, (2) expressed in common units, and (3) provide greater support to the estimated international poverty line. These national poverty lines are used to estimate an extreme international poverty line, and three higher lines that are more relevant for higher-income countries. A key finding provides evidence of the robustness and relevance of the $1.90 international poverty line as a measure of extreme poverty for low-income countries.

This paper is the first to systematically test the robustness of shared prosperity estimates to different methodological choices using a sample of countries from all regions in the world. The tests that are conducted include grouped versus microdata, nominal welfare aggregate versus adjustment for spatial price variation, and different treatment of income with negative and zero values. The empirical results reveal an only minimal impact of the proposed tests on shared prosperity estimates. Nevertheless, there are important caveats. First, spatial adjustment can change the ranking of households, affecting the distribution of the population in the bottom 40 percent. Second, the negligible impact of spatial deflation holds only if price adjustments are carried out consistently over time. Finally, the treatment of negative and zero income numbers can potentially lead to substantial differences in shared prosperity, depending on the magnitude of negative income and the share of households with negative and zero numbers across years.

Random forest is in many fields of research a common method for data driven predictions. Within economics and prediction of poverty, random forest is rarely used. Comparing out-of-sample predictions in surveys for same year in six countries shows that random forest is often more accurate than current common practice (multiple imputations with variables selected by stepwise and Lasso), suggesting that this method could contribute to better poverty predictions. However, none of the methods consistently provides accurate predictions of poverty over time, highlighting that technical model fitting by any method within a single year is not always, by itself, sufficient for accurate predictions of poverty over time.

Tunisia emerges today the only success story of the Arab Spring revolution that swept the Arab world five years ago. This poverty assessment seeks to learn from the pre and post revolution periods with a view of avoiding the repetition of past mistakes in the future. Specifically, it will provide Tunisians with a more detailed and updated diagnostics of poverty, regional disparities, trends over time and the strong links between poverty, inequality, opportunities, and vulnerability. Beyond statistics, this report will also provide a somber but more balanced alternative explanation of socioeconomic development in the country, which will hopefully complement the efforts of the Government of Tunisia to develop and implement its strategic development plan. This poverty assessment questions the extent to which growth was truly pro-poor in Tunisia and, more importantly, capable of reducing inequalities and increasing inclusion in society. This questioning sheds light on Tunisia’s prospects for a more prosperous society if substantive changes in the socioeconomic model are not introduced. The poverty assessment analysis goes into a post-2010 analysis; expanding as well the analysis of monetary poverty to broader concepts of vulnerability and equal opportunities; and by enriching traditional instruments with more sophisticated tools to measure poverty, analyze poverty dynamics, and simulate the effects of certain policy reforms for the first time in Tunisia.

This paper uses panel data to analyze factors that contributed to the rapid decline in poverty in India between 2005 and 2012. The analysis employs a nonparametric decomposition method that measures the relative contributions of different components of household livelihoods to observed changes in poverty. The results show that poverty decline is associated with a significant increase in labor earnings, explained in turn by a steep rise in wages for unskilled labor, and diversification from farm to nonfarm sources of income in rural areas. Transfers, in the form of remittances and social programs, have contributed but are not the primary drivers of poverty decline over this period. The pattern of changes is consistent with processes associated with structural transformation, which add up to a highly pro-poor pattern of income growth over the initial distribution of income and consumption. However, certain social groups (Adivasis and Dalits) are found to be more likely to stay in or fall into poverty and less likely to move out of poverty. And even as poverty has reduced dramatically, the share of vulnerable population has not.

This paper uses a set of national household surveys to study the regional Sub-Saharan Africa distribution of consumption expenditure among individuals during 1993 to 2008. The analysis puts the disparities in living standards that exist among persons in Africa into context with the disparities that exist within and between African countries. Regional interpersonal inequality has increased (from a Gini index of 52 percent in 1993 to 56 percent in 2008), driven by increasing disparities in living standards across countries, while there has been no systematic increase in within-country inequality. For the African distribution as a whole, growth of consumption expenditure (from household surveys) has been low (around 1 percent per year). This growth has been uneven and as a result the richest 5 percent of Africans received around 40 percent of the total gains, while the bottom third stagnated.

In recent years, Turkey has been host to more than two million Syrians seeking refuge. Initially concentrated in the southeastern regions, these refugees now reside throughout the country. There are many questions from policy makers regarding the impact of the population of Syrians Under Temporary Protection on the host community. This paper examines the impact of migrants on regional host communities from a poverty perspective. The paper does not find any negative impacts on poverty for the host community from the increasing population of Syrians Under Temporary Protection as of 2013, despite the high poverty rates experienced among the recent migrants.

Analysis of Sri Lanka’s recent progress in reducing poverty and inequality is directly relevant to the new government’s development agenda. The newly sworn-in president ran for election on a platform that featured, among other goals, inclusive growth and support to the agricultural sector. The pursuit of these and other goals of the new administration can be informed by a fuller understanding of recent developments in household living standards across the country. Yet the World Bank’s most recent poverty assessment in Sri Lanka, covering the period from 1990 to 2002, was published a decade ago. Since then, domestic economic growth, the end of the civil conflict and fluctuations in global markets has led to substantial changes in Sri Lanka’s economic environment. To inform the new government’s development policies, this report examines five topics related to recent developments in poverty and welfare. Sections two through five of the report focus on: (i) trends in poverty, welfare, and inequality since 2002, (ii) labor market outcomes associated with the observed reduction in poverty, (iii) four potential causes of this poverty reduction, (iv) the state of poverty and inequality in 2012/13, and (v) the role of social protection in reducing poverty. Section six concludes by pointing out future implications and remaining knowledge gaps to continue to reduce poverty and improve living standards. This analysis draws mainly on data from the 2002, 2006-07, 2009-10, and 2012-13 rounds of the Household Income and Expenditure Survey, supplemented by annual rounds of the labor force survey from 2002 to 2012. Since the surveys could not be conducted in parts of the Northern and Eastern provinces before 2011 due to the civil conflict, their geographical coverage varies from year to year. To ensure comparability, all historical trends presented in this report correspond to the same geographic area. With the exception of figures that are based solely on 2012-13 data, the figures exclude Northern and Eastern provinces, which account for about 12.9 percent of the total population. A more detailed description of the data is provided in appendix one.

In the past decade, Turkey has experienced a notable level of poverty reduction at all levels (extreme poor, poor, and vulnerable). The steady decline in poverty was also resilient to the decline in gross domestic product per capita growth during the crisis. However, although poverty convergence was strong before the financial crisis, there was an absence of regional convergence afterward. This paper analyzes poverty trends, poverty convergence, economic mobility, and the determinants of poverty reduction at the regional level over the period 2006–13. The analysis finds that agricultural growth in the east was an important contributor to Turkey's regional poverty reduction. In additionally, employment growth in the services sectors boosted poverty reduction throughout the entire country. From a fiscal perspective, the amount of per capita central spending is also linked to poverty reduction, although more strongly for regions in the west.

This brief is based on analysis of the 2011-12 household budget survey (HBS) implemented by Central Administration for Statistics (CAS) with technical assistance from the World Bank. The survey was conducted during the period of September 2011 to November 2012, and was stratified across nine regions. The sample was designed to cover 4,805 households, but due to high non-response, it only includes 2,476 participating households. Poverty numbers presented in this note are not comparable with poverty estimates for other years due to differences in the instruments, fieldwork implementation and to some extent sample design; and also due to differences in the methodology for constructing welfare aggregate and the poverty line. All regional estimates in this report should be viewed with caution given concerns about significant levels of nonresponse and relatively small sample sizes within regions. CAS and the World Bank are working together to improve the quality of future surveys.

Labor-intensive public works programs are important social protection tools in low-income settings, intended to supplement income of poor households and improve public infrastructure. In this evaluation of the Malawi Social Action Fund, an at-scale, government-operated program, across- and within-village randomization is used to estimate effects on food security and use of fertilizer. There is no evidence that the program improves food security, and some negative spillovers to untreated households. These disappointing results hold even under modifications to the design of the program to offer work during the lean rather than harvest season or increase the frequency of payments.

This paper evaluates how the Philippines utilize social protection systems and programs to help households better manage disaster risk. Exposure and vulnerability to natural disasters and the effects of climate change are particularly high in the Philippines. At the same time, the Philippines has developed one of the most advanced social protection systems in the East Asia Pacific region. The Department of Social Welfare and Development is prominently integrated into the national disaster risk management framework of the Philippines, taking the lead coordinating role in disaster response activities. Consequently, social protection programs are on the frontlines of disaster response in the Philippines. This paper focuses specifically on the devastating impact of Typhoon Yolanda, which struck the country in November 2013, as a case study against which the Philippines’ social protection response can be assessed.

In response to a growing interest in comparing inequality levels and trends across countries, several cross-national inequality databases are now available. These databases differ considerably in purpose, coverage, data sources, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and quality of documentation. A special issue of the Journal of Economic Inequality, which this paper introduces, is devoted to an assessment of the merits and shortcomings of eight such databases. Five of these sets are microdata-based: CEPALSTAT, Income Distribution Database, Luxembourg Income Study, PovcalNet, and Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean. Two are based on secondary sources: All the Ginis and the World Income Inequality Database; and one is generated entirely through multiple-imputation methods: the Standardized World Income Inequality Database. Although there is much agreement across these databases, there is also a nontrivial share of country/year cells for which substantial discrepancies exist. In some cases, different databases would lead users to radically different conclusions about inequality dynamics in certain countries and periods. The methodological differences that lead to these discrepancies often appear to be driven by a fundamental trade-off between a wish for broader coverage on the one hand, and for greater comparability on the other hand. These differences across databases place considerable responsibility on both producers and users: on the former, to better document and explain their assumptions and procedures, and on the latter, to understand the data they are using, rather than merely taking them as true because available.

The impacts of climate change on poverty depend on the magnitude of climate change, but also on demographic and socioeconomic trends. An analysis of hundreds of baseline scenarios for future economic development in the absence of climate change in 92 countries shows that the drivers of poverty eradication differ across countries. Two representative scenarios are selected from these hundreds. One scenario is optimistic regarding poverty and is labeled “prosperity;” the other scenario is pessimistic and labeled “poverty.” Results from sector analyses of climate change impacts—in agriculture, health, and natural disasters—are introduced in the two scenarios. By 2030, climate change is found to have a significant impact on poverty, especially through higher food prices and reduction of agricultural production in Africa and South Asia, and through health in all regions. But the magnitude of these impacts depends on development choices. In the prosperity scenario with rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development, climate change increases poverty by between 3 million and 16 million in 2030. The increase in poverty reaches between 35 million and 122 million if development is delayed and less inclusive (the poverty scenario).

With 2015 marking the transition from the Millennium to the Sustainable Development Goals, the international community can celebrate many development successes since 2000. Three key challenges stand out: the depth of remaining poverty, the unevenness in shared prosperity, and the persistent disparities in non-income dimensions of development. First, the policy discourse needs to focus more directly on the poorest among the poor. While pockets of ultra-poverty exist around the world, Sub-Saharan Africa is home to most of the deeply poor. To make depth a more central element in policy formulation, easy-to-communicate measures are needed, and this note attempts a step in this direction with person-equivalent measures of poverty. Second, the eradication of poverty in all of its forms requires steady growth of the incomes of the bottom 40 percent. Yet, economic growth, a key driver of shared prosperity, may not be as buoyant as before the global financial crisis. Third, unequal progress in non-income dimensions of development requires addressing widespread inequality of opportunity, which transmits poverty across generations and erodes the pace and sustainability of progress for the bottom 40. To meet these challenges, three ingredients are core to the policy agenda: sustaining broad-based growth, investing in human development, and insuring the poor and vulnerable against emerging risks.

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank’s twin goals, the new poverty line was chosen so as to preserve the definition and real purchasing power of the earlier $1.25 line (in 2005 PPPs) in poor countries. Using the new 2011 PPPs, the new line equals $1.90 per person per day. The higher value of the line in US dollars reflects the fact that the new PPPs yield a relatively lower purchasing power of that currency vis-à-vis those of most poor countries. Because the line was designed to preserve real purchasing power in poor countries, the revisions lead to relatively small changes in global poverty incidence: from 14.5 percent in the old method to 14.1 percent in the new method for 2011. In 2012, the new reference year for the global count, we find 12.7 percent of the world’s population, or 897 million people, are living in extreme poverty. There are changes in the regional composition of poverty, but they are also relatively small. This paper documents the detailed methodological decisions taken in the process of updating both the poverty line and the consumption and income distributions at the country level, including issues of inter-temporal and spatial price adjustments. It also describes various caveats, limitations, perils and pitfalls of the approach taken.

Afghanistan’s per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an average annual rate of 6.9 percent during that period. In contrast, in 2007-08, 36 percent of Afghans were poor, and four years later, still, more than one in three Afghans did not have the buying power to satisfy their basic food and non-food needs. Economic growth in Afghanistan, therefore, is not in and of itself enough to reduce poverty. To achieve poverty reduction, economic growth needs to be far more inclusive for everyone, regardless of their circumstances. While economic growth is necessary to reduce poverty, the poor must actually benefit from that growth. Poverty reduction hinges on the ability of the poorest to earn a good living; accumulate, control, and protect assets; and access quality services and opportunities. For Afghanistan, this means: strengthening agriculture, investing in human development, managing and mitigating risk.

This issue includes the following headings: living on the edge in Mexico; what has the rise of China meant for labor markets in Latin America?; educating our future teachers; the growing and long-lasting effects of Brazil’s trade liberalization on workers; capturing food consumed away from home in welfare measures; a behavioral approach to water conservation; and using satellite images to estimate local poverty.

Many countries develop systems to identify the poor and vulnerable in order to direct program resources to these areas and groups, often to ensure their inclusion in social service provision orcommunity development. Determining eligibility typically depends on the overall program objectives, patterns of poverty, vulnerability and exclusion, social norms, and fiscal and political feasibility. Targeted programs use a range of tools to prioritize specific areas andpeople, in keeping with data availability and existing administrative capacity. Depending on these policy choices, effective delivery systems for beneficiary registration, management, monitoring, and recertification need to be developed, with clear assignment of roles and responsibilities at different levels. Many countries have done so in a coordinated fashion, so the same system can be used to support eligibility verification for multiple programs.

Poverty estimates based on enumeration from a single point in time form the cornerstone for much of the literature on poverty. Households are typically interviewed once about their consumption or income, and their wellbeing is assessed from their responses. Global estimates of poverty that aggregate poverty counts from all countries implicitly assume that the counts are comparable. This paper illustrates that this assumption of comparability is potentially invalid when households are interviewed multiple times with repeat visits throughout the year. The paper provides an example from Jordan, where the internationally comparable approach of handling the data from repeat visits yields a poverty rate that is 26 percent greater than the rate that is currently reported as the official estimate. The paper also explores alternative definitions of poverty, informed in part by the psychological and biophysical literature on the long-run effects of short-term exposure to poverty or generally adverse environments. This alternative concept of poverty suggests that the prevalence of those who have been affected by poverty in Jordan during 2010 is more than twice as large as the official 2010 estimate of poverty.

Measuring poverty and tracking it over time is an important prerequisite to national economic planning. Absence of official data on household expenditure or poverty line hampered the ability of Iraqi policymakers to understand the extent of the problem, analyze their causes, and devise appropriate policies. Iraq household socioeconomic survey (IHSES) 2006-07 was the first survey of its kind since 1988 to cover all 18 governorates. The survey collected rich information on income, expenditure, employment, housing, education, health, and other socioeconomic indicators. Building on the experience of the first IHSES survey and using international best practice on sampling and questionnaire design and survey implementation, the second round of IHSES was fielded in 201-/13. To fill the data gap, a larger survey was designed to collect information on correlates of household welfare like demographic characteristics, education, occupation, housing, and assets and estimate small-area poverty rates using projection methods. This report presents results from the exercise, the first of its kind for Iraq. Poverty mapping not only provides a visual representation of poverty at subnational levels, it also reveals pockets of poverty and islands of prosperity where they exist. This knowledge is useful to inform decisions on policy design and targeting of development projects and programs.

The purpose of this note is to provide the monetary cost of various social safety net targeting schemes that can be deployed to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience. It is believed that gradually switching to the provision of social safety nets can reduce the chronic dependency on humanitarian (mainly food) aid. At the same time, it could help to alleviate reliance on patronage networks and switch a portion of the public spending from unproductive uses (e.g., military expenditure) toward strengthening the resilience and supporting the livelihoods of South Sudanese. In addition, a social safety net would address the fatigues of years of weak governance and ongoing efforts to find more direct, transparent ways to enable citizens to reap the benefits of independence and – once it materializes – peace.

Several studies have used satellite measures of human activity to complement measures of economic production. This paper builds on those studies by considering satellite measures for improving poverty measures. The paper uses local-scale census and survey data from Guatemala to test at how fine a scale satellite measures are useful. Results show that supplementing survey data with satellite data leads to improvements in the estimates.

Between 2008 and 2012 the urban/rural poverty divide substantially narrowed down, which was the result of relatively stable rural and rising urban poverty rates. Over the same period, food inflation spiked, whereby strong links between domestic and global price movements were observed owed to major import dependence on food. The high shares of consumption that households dedicate to food, especially among the poor, leave limited scope to deal with food price surges by economizing on non-food expenditure. Food price increases of 5, 10, and 15 percent are estimated to increase poverty rates between 2 and 5 percentage points in the baseline scenario.

Over the last decade, the Kyrgyz Republic experienced volatile but positive economic growth. Since the early 2000s, the share of working age population has been growing robustly and foreign labor markets have been an important source of employment. The Kyrgyz Republic has achieved large reductions in poverty over the past decade, but in recent years progress has diminished. During 2003-2012, the Kyrgyz Republic saw significant convergence between urban and rural poverty rates. Poverty reduction during 2003-2013 was driven mostly by growth rather than redistribution.

Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys around the world haven not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from clear, and the direction of the impact cannot be established a priori, since consumption of food away from home affects both food consumption and the poverty line. This paper exploits rich data on food away from home collected as part of the National Household Survey in Peru, shedding light to the extent to which welfare measures differ depending on whether they properly account for food away from home. Peru is a relevant context, with the average Peruvian household spending 28 percent of their food budget on food away from home by 2010. The analysis indicates that failure to account for the consumption of food away from home has important implications for poverty and inequality measures as well as the understanding of who the poor are. First, accounting for food away from home results in extreme poverty rates that are 18 percent higher and moderate poverty rates that are 16 percent lower. These results are also consistent, in fact more pronounced, with poverty gap and severity measures. Second, consumption inequality measured by the Gini coefficient decreases by 1.3 points when food away from home is included, a significant reduction. Finally, inclusion of food away from home results in a reclassification of households from poor to non-poor status and vice versa: 20 percent of the poor are different when the analysis includes consumption of food away from home. This effect is large enough that a standard poverty profile analysis results in significant differences between the poverty classification based on whether food away from home is included or not. The differences cover many dimensions, including demographics, education, and labor market characteristics. Taken together, the results indicate that a serious rethinking of how to deal with the consumption of food away from home in measuring well-being is urgently needed to properly estimate and understand poverty around the world.

This note describes the trends in, and composition of, absolute poverty based on household expenditures, and is thus concerned, as a matter of policy objectives, with access of the population to a particular minimum standard of living. This should be viewed as complementary to the companion note on social exclusion based on Europe 2020 indicators including the relative at-risk-of-poverty (AROP) rate, focuses on low income in relation to other residents in a given country. In addition to the analysis of absolute poverty, the note also presents an analysis of inclusive growth, aimed at assessing whether income growth (losses) benefit (impact) differentially the lowest part (here, bottom forty percent) of the distribution. Other approaches, such as those including measures of poverty based on current income, or self-reported measures of affordability, or approached that differ in the way they set the poverty threshold exist. The choice of World Bank’s methodology for purposes of this report is primarily on pragmatic grounds: (i) it allows for the analysis of trends during 2007-2011; (ii) the same methodology was adopted in the previous report (World Bank 2009) to analyze poverty trends during 2004-2007, thus providing a longer trend; (iii) it allows for comparisons of trends across the entities of BiH.

With the recent release of the 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) data from the International Comparison Program (ICP), analysts and institutions are confronted with the question of whether and how to use them for global poverty estimation. The previous round of PPP data from 2005 led to a large increase in the estimated number of poor in the world. The 2011 price data suggest that developing countries’ incomes in PPP-adjusted dollars are significantly higher than indicated by the 2005 PPP data. This has created the anticipation that the new PPP data will decrease significantly the count of poor people in the world. This paper presents evidence that if the global poverty line is updated with the 2011 PPP data based on the same set of national poverty lines that define the $1.25 line in 2005 PPPs, and if the 2011 PPP conversion factors are used without adjustments to selected countries, the 2011 poverty rate is within half a percentage point of the current global estimate based on 2005 PPPs. The analysis also indicates that the goal of ‘ending’ extreme poverty by 2030 continues to be an ambitious one.

Accurately measuring poverty and assessing trends in its incidence and severity are among the most fundamental challenges in economic development. The issue of effective poverty measurement has been the subject of renewed interest since the United Nations adopted the millennium development goals (MDGs) in 2000. In Niger, as in many comparable countries worldwide, poverty data are collected through household surveys of consumption patterns and living conditions. A number of methodological factors can affect the accuracy of consumption data during the collection phase, especially the number of survey visits, the time of year during which the questionnaire is administered, the recall period, and the composition of the consumption basket defined in the survey. The purpose of this paper is to produce a robust analysis of poverty trends in Niger from 2005 to 2011 by using the 2011 survey as the basis for monitoring poverty and correcting for methodological differences in earlier surveys. The decision to use the 2011 survey as the basis for establishing methodological consistency is rooted in two factors. First, the large variations in poverty estimates obtained in different survey periods are suspected to be due in part to changes in the survey methodology. Second, the 2011 survey coincided with the adoption of Niger’s current growth and poverty reduction strategy, programme de développement economique et social (PDES). The report describes the 2011 survey methodology and the techniques used to make the previous figures compatible with this methodology. It presents the revised poverty figures and discusses their implications. It also offers conclusions and recommendations.

Recent National Sample Surveys point to significant poverty reduction in India since 2004/05, with a marked acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. This paper enquires into important aspects of income mobility between 2004/05 and 2011/12, based on new statistical methods to convert the three pertinent National Sample Survey rounds into synthetic panels. The analysis draws on the synthetic panels to derive a vulnerability line for India that can be used to separate out a population subgroup comprising non-poor households facing a heightened risk of falling into poverty. The paper documents a strong pattern of upward mobility out of poverty and vulnerability into the middle class, with a noticeable acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. The paper further undertakes a careful investigation into the comparability of the survey rounds, prompted by the observation that fairly significant modifications had been made to survey questionnaires. The findings suggest that changes in questionnaire design have not compromised the comparability of the data.

This note presents 9 stylized facts that emerge related to the evolution of poverty and inequality over the 2002 to 2012 period, especially from 2008 to 2012, as well as some insights into the drivers of poverty changes. It complements existing work on monitoring and understanding shared prosperity – the second corporate goal of the World Bank along with reducing poverty - in Albania and the Western Balkans. Albania poverty estimates are based on the Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS). The LSMS is conducted by the Albania Statistics Office (INSTAT) with donor funding and has been carried out in 2002, 2005, 2008 and recently in 2012.

This note expands the analysis on poverty and income distribution reported by the FYR Macedonia SSO for 2010 and 2011. The present work is based on an analysis performed in-situ by World Bank staff on the offices of the FYR Macedonian SSO.

The Country Partnership Framework (CPF) will succeed the Myanmar interim strategy note (FY13-14) and be the first full country strategy for Myanmar since 1984. This CPF comes at a time of great opportunity for Myanmar; over the three year period covered in this CPF, the reforms initiated in 2011 have the potential to bring Myanmar into a new era of peace and prosperity. Myanmar s history, ethnic diversity, and geography combine into a unique set of development challenges and opportunities, including (i) emergence from a long period of international isolation; (ii) widespread poverty, despite rich land, water, and mineral resource endowments; (iii) a strategic location in the fastest-growing region in the world; (iv) the role of the military and associated groups in the economy; and (v) long standing armed conflict and ethnic and religious tensions. Myanmar is on a path of fundamental transformation, seeking to address all these challenges and opportunities simultaneously. Along with unique opportunities, the CPF supported program will also face substantial risks. Political risks associated with the elections in late 2015 include a polarization among stakeholders, policy discontinuity, and a slow-down of reforms. The national peace process to resolve decades-old conflicts remains fragile. On the economic front, risks include vulnerability to volatile oil and gas prices, spending pressures, an underdeveloped financial sector, and a weak regulatory framework, while overall capacity constraints may limit the country s ability to effectively manage macro-financial shocks. The design of the WBG program will help manage and mitigate these risks, and the WBG will regularly review risks and opportunities and adapt the CPF during implementation as warranted. A performance and learning review planned for late FY16 will facilitate the adaptation of the WBG program to country developments as needed.

This study discusses the impact of economic geography and (low) population density on development outcomes in Mali and explores how policies to reduce poverty can be made more effective by taking these two factors into account. The crisis in north Mali which started in 2012 and continues to date has brought questions of economic geography to the center of attention. To help answer such questions, and to analyze how to reduce poverty in Mali as a whole, this study uses different sources of information to analyze the diversity of livelihood patterns, in access to services and in living standards. The study uses quantitative information from household surveys, population and firm censuses, administrative and geographic data, and qualitative information about livelihoods. This study argues that the authorities will need to employ all three policy instruments, while emphasizing that if the objective is poverty reduction, most attention should be focused on spatially blind approaches. The study is organized as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two emphasizes differences in population density which allows distinguishing between types of agglomeration from villages, to rural town, to large cities. Chapter three categorizes the country into various livelihood zones and considers how the agro-physical environment affects the way people live. In chapter four authors turn to household welfare. Chapter five considers access to services. Chapter six is forward looking.