Poverty and Inequality

The Poverty and Inequality Research Program has two main objectives: (1) improve current data as well as methods and tools for poverty and inequality analysis and (2) use the improved data and existing data sources to better understand the economic and social processes determining the extent of poverty and inequality and to assess the effectiveness of specific policies in reducing poverty.

Featured

Violence without Borders: The Internationalization of Crime and Conflict
June 2020
This Policy Research Report documents how permeable country borders have become in many different domains, and the troubling human and economic costs as the geographical spillovers of conflict and crime and political instability have intensified. The report suggests international institutions can play a critical role in stabilizing domestic fragility by moving settlement of disputes away from battlefields and toward global platforms.
Policy Research Report | Video | Blog
How Two Tests Can Help Contain COVID-19 and Revive the Economy
April 29, 2020
Faced with COVID-19 (Coronavirus), countries are taking drastic action based on little information. Two tests can help governments shorten and soften economically costly suppression measures while still containing the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This brief suggests strategies to target their use and discusses the benefits and costs of such strategies.
Research & Policy Brief 29 | More Research & Policy Briefs
Supporting Poor Households Affected by COVID-19

April 20, 2020
This Development Policy and COVID-19 eSeminar addresses two distinct but intricately related issues: the design features of social safety net programs that need to be created, adapted, or expanded in response to the pandemic and the practical issue of payment logistics drawing on ongoing and past experiences with the roll-out of government payment programs in Peru, India, Bangladesh, east Africa and beyond.
Video and event materials | Development Policy and COVID-19 eSeminars

LATEST WORKING PAPERS

Lives and Livelihoods: Estimates of the Global Mortality and Poverty Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic
Benoit Decerf, Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Daniel G. Mahler, Olivier Sterck
Policy Research Working Paper 9277, June 2020

Sophisticated Policy with Naive Agents: Habit Formation and Piped Water in Vietnam
Quy-Toan Do, Hanan Jacoby
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9207, April 2020

The Globalization of Refugee Flows
Xavier Devictor, Quy-Toan Do, Andrei A. Levchenko
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9206, April 2020

More Working Papers

LATEST JOURNAL ARTICLES

The Price Elasticity of African Elephant Poaching
Quy-Toan Do, Andrei A Levchenko, Lin Ma, Julian Blanc, Holly Dublin, Tom Milliken, The World Bank Economic Review, April 2020 | Working Paper Version.

The Distribution of Consumption Expenditure in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Inequality Among All Africans
La-Bhus Fah Jirasavetakul and Christoph Lakner
Journal of African Economies 29 (1): 1-25, January 2020.

Effects of nutritional supplementation and home visiting on growth and development in young children in Madagascar: a cluster-randomised controlled trial
Emanuela Galasso, Ann M Weber, Christine P Stewart, Lisy Ratsifandrihamanana, and Lia C H Fernald, Global Health 7 (9): PE1257-E1268, September 2019.

LATEST BLOGS AND ARTICLES

Can group testing help us get back to the office?
Berk Özler | Development Impact | July 7, 2020

Global security as a public good: a call to action for the international community
Faisal A. Baig, Quy-Toan Do, Lakshmi Iyer | Let’s Talk Development | June 25, 2020

Covid-19 in Latin America: A pandemic meets extreme inequality
Francisco Ferreira, Marta Schoch | Let’s Talk Development | June 10, 2020

The data behind your data
Berk Özler | Development Impact | May 11, 2020

How would you distribute COVID-response funds to poor countries?
Christoph Lakner, Berk Özler, Roy van der Weide | Let’s Talk Development | April 13, 2020

New data for development policy
Bob Cull, Dean Mitchell Jolliffe, Vijayendra Rao | Let’s Talk Development | April 2, 2020

How Two Tests Can Help Contain COVID-19 and Revive the Economy
Damien de Walque, Jed Friedman, Roberta Gatti, Aaditya Mattoo, Research & Policy Brief 29 | April 2020

Shared Prosperity: Concepts, Data, and Some Policy Examples
Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Emanuela Galasso, and Mario Negre | Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Economics and Finance | March 2020

Is there a trade-off between lives and incomes in the response to Covid-19?
Francisco H. G. Ferreira | Let’s Talk Development | March 30, 2020

How should we design cash transfer programs?
Berk Özler | Let’s Talk Development, February 6, 2020