This study examines the efficiency and productivity of public education expenditure in 20 countries using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist Productivity Index over the period 2011-2023. Focusing on science and mathematics performance at the primary and lower-secondary levels, the...

The HCI+ measures how effectively a country builds human capital, tracking the likelihood that children today will grow into healthy, educated, and productive adults. It integrates measures from three dimensions of human capital—health, education, and employment—into one index using...

The World Bank launched the Human Capital Index (HCI) to highlight the importance of investments in human capital and to benchmark key components of human capital across countries. This HCI is an international metric that measures the amount of human capital a child born today can be expected to...

In recent decades, the international community has recognized the need to measure poverty more comprehensively, by incorporating various dimensions of well-being. More than half of Latin American countries have developed official multidimensional poverty indices, which are essential for...

The consumer price index (CPI) plays a critical role in measuring inflation. Recent inflation trends, however, have raised questions about its accuracy. This paper evaluates several of these critiques, including that the CPI fails to keep up with rapid changes in consumer expenditure patterns;...

Passenger transportation in Japan's main metropolitan areas is operated by the JR companies, which were privatized and divested from Japan National Railways (JNR) in 1987 and by 16 major private railway companies with large-scale operations. Although their core business is transportation, the...

Housing rents are one of the most important and difficult elements of spatial cost of living comparisons. Difficulties arise from the lack of sufficiently detailed and harmonized data, especially at the international level. The emergence of Airbnb has created a valuable new source of...

Der Länderindex Familienunternehmen 2024 vergleicht zum zehnten Mal seit 2006 die Standortbedingungen für Familienunternehmen in den wichtigsten Industrieländern. Konzeptionell orientiert sich der Standortvergleich an den Faktoren, die für die Geschäftsmodelle großer Familienunternehmen...

The European Union has improved living standards, yet welfare disparities persist across regions, countries, and demographic groups. This paper uses data from European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys and the at-risk-of-poverty or social...

We propose a sentiment-based financial stress index (S-FSI) for Russia from January 2018 to June 2024. The index is based on the intensity of internet searches in Russian via Google and Yandex for terms with negative connotations about financial stability. The terms in our index form a unique...

Forecasting stock markets is challenging due to the influence of various internal and external factors compounded by the effects of globalization. This study introduces a data-driven approach to forecast S&P 500 returns by incorporating macroeconomic indicators including gold and oil prices, the...

This Technical Report documents the construction and coverage of the IWH European Real Estate Index (EREI). Since 2018, we have used machine-learning methods to collect monthly listings of residential real estate available for sale or rent in up to 20 European countries. The Technical Report...

As climate change intensifies, countries experience varying degrees of vulnerability and resilience that influence their capacity to withstand and recover from environmental, economic, and social shocks. This study introduces the Multidimensional Vulnerability and Lack of Resilience Index...

The issue of introducing a vulnerability indicator in an aid allocation formula such as the Performance Based Allocation (PBA) used by several Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) has been discussed for a long time. Three reasons make it particularly desirable to now reconsider the issue.

This article is an excerpted chapter from a research handbook on inflation in which we document measurement issues in the compilation of consumer price indexes. From defining the conceptual target to sampling, repricing, and aggregating the data, there are numerous issues that arise. In this...

Economic stability in emerging market economies is increasingly shaped by the interplay between global financial integration, domestic monetary dynamics, and asset price fluctuations. Yet, early detection of financial market disruptions remains a persistent challenge. This study constructs a...

Aim of this study is to examine the coherence of consumer price indices (CPI) variants in Pakistan using time series data. The techniques of data analysis are descriptive statistics and wavelet analysis. Plots of CPI variants show more frequent changes as compared to the base year / month from...

This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric and systematic literature review analysis of the literature on the Big Mac Index (BMI) to identify its foundational aspects and summarize key findings. The BMI, an informal measure of purchasing power parity, has garnered scholarly interest in...

This study aims to construct a sentiment index for predicting CPI in Vietnam. Adopting a lexicon-based approach, the study utilized two widely recognized sentiment dictionaries, specialized in financial and economic contexts, to build the sentiment index. Data was mined from nine official...

This study aims to improve the understanding of quality of life (QoL) by evaluating key indicators, identifying influential factors, and assessing their relative weights. This study utilizes panel data from 181 cases across 32 European countries (2012-2017). The study employs exploratory and...

The extent to which women participate in the labor market varies greatly across the globe. If such differences reflect distortions that women face in accessing good jobs, they can reduce economic activity through a misallocation of talent. This paper builds on Hsieh et al. (2019) to provide a...

This note presents the 9th edition of the World Bank's Multidimensional Poverty Measure (MPM) database, drawing on the latest country data from the Global Monitoring Database (GMD) as of June 2025. The MPM offers a broader view of poverty by examining deprivations along three dimensions of...

Since the publication of the previous (2022) RISE edition, progress toward universal electrification reversed course for the first time in 20 years. About 685 million people, most of them living in Sub-Saharan Africa, lacked access in 2022. While RISE electricity access scores climbed in many...