Monitoring progress towards the World Bank Group's (WBG) goals, eradicating poverty and boosting shared prosperity, is essential to adjust the Bank's portfolio investment decisions and to effectively implement projects. The Poverty and Equity Global Practice has developed a suite of tools to...

Recent economic growth In Mauritania has helped reduce poverty, but spatial disparities in terms of both monetary welfare and access to services and opportunities remain. Designing policies and projects to improve living conditions requires localized and updated data not usually available from...

It is critical to ensure that the World Bank portfolio is well targeted to areas with the greatest needs and with greatest potential to maximize development benefits. The Project Targeting Index (PTI) offers an evidence-based approach to inform spatial targeting of projects based on country...

Boosting shared prosperity also means including disadvantaged groups in the labor market. While many factors can hinder labor force participation, behavioral factors have emerged as key barriers in the case of Mauritian youth with little education. This Note describes the results of an...

The ability to access the internet has increasingly become an important tool for poverty reduction, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite its importance, measuring internet use in low-income settings is plagued by differences between data sources and lack of a consistent definition of...

This note illustrates the multidimensional nature of poverty in Djibouti. The authors use the multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which captures several welfare dimensions - monetary poverty, education, and access to basic infrastructure - to compare the extent to which different populations...

This note focuses on the welfare and competition (WELCOM) microsimulation tool. WELCOM, an easy-to-use stata-based package with minimum data requirements, was conceived as part of larger World Bank efforts to better understand how competition policy can improve market efficiency and reduce...

Policy makers hesitate to increase tobacco taxes over concerns about taxes being regressive and potentially increasing poverty and inequality. This note summarizes a set of studies of the effects of raising tobacco taxes in 11 low and middle-income countries using an extended cost-benefit...

This paper combines remote-sensed data and individual child, mother, and household-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 5 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to design a prototype drought-contingent targeting framework for use in scarce-data contexts. To accomplish this, the paper:...

Different studies use different approaches to forecast how many people will fall into poverty due to the outbreak of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), with largely different results. Even when using the same growth forecasts and poverty lines, poverty projections differ largely by approaches: one...