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This paper aims to model the dynamics of social deprivation in Mexico using a Markovian approach. First, we establish a scenario where a list of items characterizing social deprivation evolves as a first-order Markov chain under the sample period (2002-2012). Then, we estimate latent states and ergodic vectors of a hidden-Markov model to verify the strength of the conclusions drawn from such a scenario. After collecting results from both kinds of analyses, we find a similar pattern of impoverishment. The paper's conclusions state that the evolution of Mexico's deprivation profile may slightly worsen soon.

This poverty assessment focuses on the evolution of poverty and other social indicators in Ethiopia between 2010-11 and 2015-2016 (henceforth referred to as 2011 and 2016). Using data from a variety of sources, mainly the twinned household living standards surveys (HCES and WMS), the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey (ESS) and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the poverty assessment documents trends in monetary and non-monetary dimensions of living standards and examines the drivers of observed trends, with a special focus on government programs. The aim of the poverty assessment is to provide policy makers and development partners with information and analysis that can be used to improve the effectiveness of their poverty reduction and social programs.

This Regional Partnership Framework (RPF) outlines the World Bank Group (WBG) strategic program for nine Pacific island countries (PIC9): Kiribati, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Republic of Nauru, Republic of Palau, Independent State of Samoa, Kingdom of Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. Seven of these countries are IDA-eligible and have seen a substantial increase in WBG presence and engagement in recent years. The RPF builds upon the deepening engagement with Samoa, Tonga, and Kiribati, and the ability to channel significantly more resources to FSM, RMI, Vanuatu and Tuvalu following their recent reclassification as IDA eligible. The RPF also outlines options for engagement with Nauru and Palau, which are IBRD countries. In summary, this RPF will guide a WBG engagement in the Pacific which will build on what has been achieved so far but also seek to achieve further impacts in three main ways. First, increased IDA18 allocations will provide opportunities to finance projects that are larger in size and scope. Second, building on the results of the SCD and other recent analytical work, the WBG program will be highly selective and focused on helping the PICs make the most of a few key opportunities and effectively mitigate the main risks to incomes and livelihoods which they are facing. Third, the WBG program will put special emphasis on addressing the drivers of fragility in the Pacific (issues related to institutional capacity, growth in youth population and urbanization, climate change and natural disasters, as well as gender) to enhance the sustainability of the activities being carried out and of the progress being achieved.

A reduction in overall poverty may not necessarily improve the situations of the poorest. In order to pay particular attention to the poorest, it is crucial to distinguish them from the moderately poor population. In income poverty measurement, this distinction is made by defining a more stringent poverty cutoff. In this paper, we explore such mechanisms to distinguish subsets of the poor in a multidimensional counting framework, under the practical assumption that many variables for assessing deprivations are ordinal. We examine two approaches that capture two distinct forms of stringent multidimensional poverty: one uses a more stringent vector of deprivation cutoffs, and the other, a more stringent cross-dimensional poverty cutoff. To explore the distinction between these two approaches empirically, we examine the evolution of multidimensional poverty in Nepal. Our findings show crucial differences between these two approaches.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fortunately, both poverty and extreme poverty have shown a significant decrease in Brazil. According to data from the National Household Sample Survey (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios - PNAD), poverty dropped over 20 per cent between 2004 and 2013, to about 9 per cent of the Brazillian population. Extreme poverty fell from about 7 per cent to 4 per cent over the same period. Much of this decline was due to the expansion of the labour market and the significant increase in transfers to poor households, through both social security and the Bolsa Família programme (Rocha 2013). [...]

Poverty in Lao PDR declined from 33.5 percent to 23.2 percent over the 10 year period between 2002/3 and 2012/13. The number of poor people declined by about half a million to 1.35 million in 2013 and Lao PDR has met its MDG target of reducing poverty to below 24 percent by 2015. Improvements in welfare are evident in the changes in other socio-economic indicators such as the ownership of televisions and access to electricity, which doubled, and the number of households living in houses built with bricks or concrete, which nearly tripled, while the proportion of those without a toilet halved. Net secondary enrollment increased from 27 percent in 2002/3 to 50 percent in 2012/13 showing significant improvements in education.

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.

This systematic country diagnosis (SCD) for Chad aims to identify how to achieve the twin goals of ending poverty and improving shared prosperity. It acknowledges both: (i) the need for selectivity in pro-poor interventions, and (ii) the inherent difficulty to do so given the many competing binding reasons for poverty. Selectivity means the identification of principal opportunities for sustainable poverty reduction in the next 15 years, as well as the identification of binding constraints to reaping such opportunities. Selectivity also implies making trade-offs between immediate and longer term objectives, with priority given to the identification of poverty reduction opportunities which will: (i) deliver the highest possible results before 2030, and (ii) not undermine prospects for poverty reduction and shared prosperity beyond 2030. The analysis presented in the SCD draws on a variety of information sources. These include domestic statistics and reports, evaluations by the country’s development partners, original research conducted by the World Bank team, and consultations held in N’Djamena with nongovernmental organizations and the private sector. Reaping poverty reduction opportunities will require addressing a selected number of binding constraints.

Public Work Programs (PWPs) can be a useful tool for poverty reduction and social protection provision in Myanmar by presenting a coherent framework to achieve several objectives (seasonal income and food security, disaster recovery, community resilience, social cohesion). For PWPsto be effective and sustainable, design should respond to local conditions and implementation should engage government structures that provide a scalable platform.

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.

This report examines Armenia’s experience in reducing poverty and raising the welfare of the least well-off in the country in the years since 2009. What households spend on consumption is an indicator of their welfare. As the economy recovered from crisis, the least well-off enjoyed some growth in consumption spending, but not as much as in the years up to 2009. Moreover, growth has become less pro-poor in relative terms because the less well-off enjoyed lower growth in consumption than the better-off. As a result, although consumption did translate into a reduction in poverty, inequality is now higher than before 2009. In 2013, 32 percent of Armenia’s population lived below the national poverty line, a poverty rate higher than in pre-crisis years but down from the high of 35.8 percent in 2010. In fact, between 2012 and 2013, poverty reduction seems to have stalled. This report looks at the micro and macro aspects of Armenia’s poverty reduction experience to: (a) describe the key features of post-crisis poverty, inequality, and consumption growth; (b) examine the drivers of poverty reduction in this period; and (c) explore reasons why future growth might not be as pro-poor as in the past.

Since 1991 the national poverty rate of Ghana has more than halved. The estimated national headcount poverty ratio fell by 31.2 percentage points from 52.6 percent in 1991 to 21.41 percent in 2012. Heterogeneity of poverty outcomes is, however, high both across urban and rural areas and across regions. The robustness of these poverty trends is checked with trends of five correlates: urbanization and rural-urban migration, remittances, asset growth, labor market transformations, and agricultural productivity growth. Urbanization turns out to be highly correlated with poverty reduction. Poverty trends and asset index trends turn out to follow a similar pattern in both urban and rural areas and by regions: asset index increase where poverty decreases. In the report the authors try to understand the drivers of recent decrease in poverty in northern regions. The attention is focused on two different aspects, the agricultural productivity growth and the inflation patterns. In northern regions, there is a generalized increase in production of main food crops and an increase in productivity. To test the contribution of most of these drivers to poverty reduction, the authors estimated unconditional quintile regressions over the 20th, 40th, and 60th percentiles and decomposed the results using the Oaxaca Blinder method. To further strengthen the spatial analysis of poverty the authors constructed a new poverty map based on sixth Ghana living standard survey (GLSS 6) (conducted in 2012-13) in combination with the 2010 census, which was then compared with the 2000 map. This profile focuses on inequalities seen from three different perspectives: consumption inequality, inequalities of opportunities, and polarization.

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.

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.

The last poverty assessment for Rwanda was conducted in 1997. Three years after the genocide, the country was characterized by deep and widespread poverty, rock-bottom health indicators, and pervasive hunger and food insecurity. In real terms, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was lower than it had been in 1960. In real terms, the economy quadrupled between 1995 and 2013. Enrolment in primary school is near universal and infant and child mortality are among the lowest in Africa. A large part of the population, including the extreme poor, is covered by public health insurance. This poverty assessment focuses on the evolution of poverty and other social indicators over the past decade (2000-1 and 2010-11). Using data from a variety of sources, mainly the three household living standards surveys (EICV) and the three demographic and health surveys (DHS) conducted during the past decade, the poverty assessment documents trends in monetary and non-monetary dimensions of living standards and examines the drivers of observed trends. The aim of the poverty assessment is to provide policy makers and development partners with information and analysis that can be used to improve the effectiveness of their poverty reduction and social programs.

Modifying the national poverty line to the context of observed consumption patterns of the poor is becoming popular. A context-specific poverty line would be more consistent with preferences. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence that the contrary holds and that the national poverty line is more appropriate for comparing living standards among the poor, at least under prevailing conditions in Mozambique and Ghana. The problem lies in the risk of downscaling the burden associated with cheap-calorie diets and the low nonfood component of the rural poor. The paper illustrates how observed behavior may neither reveal preferences nor detect heterogeneous preferences among the poor. Rather, the consumption pattern is the upshot of the poverty condition itself. Poverty is confused with preferences if observed cheap-calorie diets are seen as a matter of taste, whereas in fact they reflect a lack of means to consume a preferred diet of higher quality, as food Engel curve estimates indicate. Likewise, a smaller nonfood component is not a matter of a particular distaste, but an adaptation to the fact that various nonfood items (such as transport) and basic services (such as electricity and health) are simply absent in rural areas.

Since the early 2000s, Tanzania has seen remarkable economic growth and strong resilience to external shocks. Yet these achievements were overshadowed by the slow response of poverty to the growing economy. Until 2007, the poverty rate in Tanzania remained stagnant at around 34 percent despite a robust growth at an annualized rate of approximately 7 percent. This apparent disconnect between growth and poverty reduction has raised concerns among policy makers and researchers, leading to a consensus that this mismatch needed to be addressed with a sense of urgency. Over the past few years, the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (MKUKUTA) in Tanzania has given high priority to eradicating extreme poverty and promoting broad-based growth. Achieving pro-poor growth has also been widely recognized by the World Bank as a critical strategy for accelerating progress toward its twin goals of eliminating extreme poverty at the global level by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity by fostering income growth among the bottom 40 percent in every country. The official poverty figures announced by the government in November 2013 have revealed that the national strategy against poverty has begun to facilitate reductions. The basic needs poverty rate has declined from around 34 percent to 28.2 percent between 2007 and 2012, the first significant decline in the last 20 years. Identifying the policy mechanisms that have helped to increase the participation of the poor in the growth process and to speed pro-poor growth is therefore important for present and future decision-making in Tanzania on how best to eradicate poverty. Such task requires a rigorous analysis of the evolution of poverty and of the linkages between poverty, inequality, and economic growth. This report uses the availability of the new Tanzanian Household Budget Survey (HBS) for 2011 and 2012, as well as the new rebased GDP figures released in December 2014, as an opportunity to address these issues. More specifically, the report examines the recent trends in poverty and inequality and their determinants and explores how responsive poverty reduction was to economic growth and the obstacles to achieving it.

Since the early 2000s, Tanzania has seen remarkable economic growth and strong resilience to external shocks. Yet these achievements were overshadowed by the slow response of poverty to the growing economy. Until 2007, the poverty rate in Tanzania remained stagnant at around 34 percent despite a robust growth at an annualized rate of approximately 7 percent. This apparent disconnect between growth and poverty reduction has raised concerns among policy makers and researchers, leading to a consensus that this mismatch needed to be addressed with a sense of urgency. Over the past few years, the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (MKUKUTA) in Tanzania has given high priority to eradicating extreme poverty and promoting broad-based growth. Achieving pro-poor growth has also been widely recognized by the World Bank as a critical strategy for accelerating progress toward its twin goals of eliminating extreme poverty at the global level by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity by fostering income growth among the bottom 40 percent in every country. The official poverty figures announced by the government in November 2013 have revealed that the national strategy against poverty has begun to facilitate reductions. The basic needs poverty rate has declined from around 34 percent to 28.2 percent between 2007 and 2012, the first significant decline in the last 20 years. Identifying the policy mechanisms that have helped to increase the participation of the poor in the growth process and to speed pro-poor growth is therefore important for present and future decision-making in Tanzania on how best to eradicate poverty. Such task requires a rigorous analysis of the evolution of poverty and of the linkages between poverty, inequality, and economic growth. This report uses the availability of the new Tanzanian Household Budget Survey (HBS) for 2011 and 2012, as well as the new rebased GDP figures released in December 2014, as an opportunity to address these issues. More specifically, the report examines the recent trends in poverty and inequality and their determinants and explores how responsive poverty reduction was to economic growth and the obstacles to achieving it.

This Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) is part of a broader dialogue on energy tax reform and strengthening social safety nets in Djibouti. As part of a possible reform of energy taxes in Djibouti, the government of Djibouti has sought the support of the World Bank to better understand how such a policy reform can be pro-poor. The study was designed and implemented by a multisectoral committee composed of various stakeholder institutions, including the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the Ministry of Budget, the Secretary of State responsible for National Solidarity (SESN), the Department of Statistics and Demographic Studies (DISED), the Ministry of Energy, and the Ministry of Transport, with whom the teams of the Bank and the IMF collaborated throughout the process of preparation of the study. Technical meetings were held on January 30, February 2, May 25, May 28, and May 29, 2014, in Djibouti to discuss the various scenarios of reform, obtain additional information, and present preliminary quantitative results. Consultation meetings were held on July 2 and November 15, 2014, to present the findings and discuss possible reform options. This executive summary condenses the main findings of the study. The study is available as a separate report with more analyses and background information. The study is based on data from a representative household survey which includes detailed information on household expenditures and receipt of certain cash and in-kind benefits (EDAM 3-2012). The tables in this executive summary show 2014 prices, with inflation rates of 2.5 and 2.9 for 2013 and 2014, respectively.

In 2011 the statistical authorities of Bosnia-Herzegovina collected for the first time a national survey which allows monitoring the European indicators of poverty and social exclusion as well as national indicators of absolute and relative consumption poverty. The Extended Household Budget Survey (EHBS) adds extra modules to a standard Household Budget Surveys (HBS) designed to collect detailed information on household expenditures. The additional modules covered the information needed to measure poverty and social exclusion in EU Member states. In this way, the EHBS represents a hybrid solution between collecting a HBS and a Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC), the official tool for measuring poverty and social exclusion in the EU, which omits expenditure information. The note is structured as follows: section two presents a detailed description of the data, while section three discusses the three constituent indicators of AROPE, and their mutual relation, i.e. their union (the AROPE indicator) and their intersection. Section four presents additional dimensions of exclusion on which data have been collected, especially those relating to children. Section five presents a comparison of indicators of monetary poverty and social exclusion. Finally, section six summarizes the most interesting elements which have emerged from this analysis and concludes.

The report starts with an overview of poverty and inequality estimates in chapter one, focusing on the trends in poverty and the distributional pattern of growth between 2002-3 and 2012-13. Chapter two then provides a description of the poverty profile by geographical and household characteristics, both in terms of the levels of poverty and its rate of change. Consumption patterns are presented in chapter three, and other socio-economic characteristics describing the living conditions of households are presented in chapter four, which is then followed by a chapter detailing the conclusions that can be drawn from this initial poverty profile analysis. The annexes provide additional detail. Annex one provides a detailed technical explanation of the methodology for measuring poverty while annex two presents sensitivity analysis for the poverty estimates including the confidence intervals of these estimates. Annex three provides additional tables and figures on poverty and inequality including other measures of poverty.

This paper presents a poverty profile for Brazil, based on three different sources of household data for 1996. We use PPV consumption data to estimate poverty and indigence lines. ''Contagem'' data is used to allow for an unprecedented refinement of the country's poverty map. Poverty measures and shares are also presented for a wide range of population subgroups, based on the PNAD 1996, with new adjustments for imputed rents and spatial differences in cost of living. Robustness of the profile is verified with respect to different poverty lines, spatial price deflators, and equivalence scales. Overall poverty incidence ranges from 23% with respect to an indigence line to 45% with respect to a more generous poverty line. More importantly, however, poverty is found to vary significantly across regions and city sizes, with rural areas, small and medium towns and the metropolitan peripheries of the North and Northeast regions being poorest. Este artigo apresenta um perfil de pobreza para o Brasil, com base em três diferentes pesquisas domiciliares de 1996. Nós usamos a PPV para estimar as linhas de pobreza e indigência. A Contagem Populacional é usada para permitir um refinamento inédito do mapa da pobreza do país. As medidas de pobreza também são apresentadas para um amplo conjunto de sub-grupos, com base na PNAD de 1996, com novos ajustamentos por aluguéis imputados e por diferenças espaciais de custo de vida. A robustez do perfil é verificada em relação a diferentes linhas de pobreza, deflatores espaciais de preço e escalas de equivalência. A incidência total da pobreza varia de 23% considerando a linha de indigência a 45% considerando uma linha de pobreza mais generosa. Mais importante, porém, é que a pobreza varia significativamente entre regiões e tamanhos de cidades, sendo mais pobres as áreas rurais, cidades pequenas e médias e as periferias metropolitanas das regiões Norte e Nordeste.

Myanmar is going through a critical transformation in its development path - from isolation and fragmentation to openness and integration; and from pervasive state control, exclusion, and individual disengagement, to inclusion, participation, and empowerment. This dual shift is happening against a backdrop of broader political reforms that started in 2011 when a new administration took office. The country’s transition after the planned elections in 2015 will be a major test of the progress on political reforms. There remain risks of political instability, policy discontinuity, and stalled reforms due to vested interests.