The Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), the World Bank’s flagship household survey program, is organizing The Pulse of Progress: Harnessing High-Frequency Survey Data for Development Research in the Polycrisis Era conference, which will take place on December 10, 2024, at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
This one-day conference will celebrate four years of the LSMS conducting longitudinal High-Frequency Phone Surveys (HFPS) in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Initially launched to address data and knowledge gaps related to the COVID-19 pandemic, these surveys facilitate routine monitoring of large-scale events, such as health emergencies or extreme weather, and their socioeconomic impacts on communities.
They have had a transformative impact on national statistical and data systems, complementing existing in-person survey infrastructure with high-frequency data collection on policy-relevant topics. To date, more than 100 survey rounds and 200,000 interviews have been completed across the six countries.
The Pulse of Progress: Harnessing High-Frequency Survey Data for Development Research in the Polycrisis Era aims to showcase applied research that leverages high-frequency phone survey data, including but not limited to the LSMS-HFPS, as the primary data source for addressing substantive questions in development economics and related fields.
Submissions, papers, topics and data
We launched a Call for Proposals inviting researchers, particularly those at the beginning of their careers, to submit abstracts covering a wide range of topics, such as:
| Resilience and shocks | Food security |
| Health | Inequality, poverty and wellbeing |
| Education | Jobs and labor |
| Climate change | Agriculture |
| Conflict and fragility | Gender |
The authors of the abstracts selected by an internal committee will submit their full papers, and those will be presented at the conference, on December 10, 2024.
Submissions using the LSMS-HFPS data were particularly encouraged, and to facilitate them, we made available an open-access, harmonized dataset accessible here (dataset) and here (stata syntax).
The dataset covers all LSMS-HFPS survey rounds and allows linkages at the household and individual levels over time. It can be integrated with the LSMS-Integrated Survey on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) series of nationally representative face-to-face household surveys in the same countries, including geo-variables and cluster locations.
The scope of data can be explored on the LSMS webpage, while the raw LSMS-HFPS and LSMS-ISA data is available on the World Bank Microdata Library.
Contact: LSMS_HFPS@worldbank.org