After almost two decades of poverty maps produced by the World Bank and multiple advances in the literature, this paper presents a methodological update to the World Bank's toolkit for small area estimation. The paper reviews the computational procedures of the current methods used by the World...

Rapid economic growth over the past two decades lifted millions of people out of poverty in Central Asia. But the uneven spread of prosperity left many communities struggling to catch up. To support lagging regions within countries, each of the region's five national governments has made...

This paper presents a new family of Stata functions devoted to small area estimation. Small area methods attempt to solve low representativeness of surveys within areas, or the lack of data for specific areas/sub-populations. This is accomplished by incorporating information from outside...

This paper estimates country-specific costs and benefits of scaling up key nutrition investments in Nigeria. Building on the methodology established in the global report scaling up nutrition: what will it cost? Authors first estimate the costs and benefits of a nationwide scale up of ten...

This Joint Staff Advisory Note focuses on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) for Djibouti. Djibouti’s National Initiative for Social Development (“Initiative Nationale pour le Développement Social‖INDS) provides a comprehensive vision for economic growth and poverty...

This paper assesses the distributional impact of the recent VAT reform in the Philippines and evaluates alternative methods to mitigate the effects of the reform on poor households. The reform was progressive and relatively well targeted. To alleviate the impact of the reform on the poor,...

This Selected Issues paper highlights the Philippine growth performance led by the services sector. Average GDP growth is higher in the post-Asian crisis period in the Philippines, while the majority of the Philippines’s regional peers have experienced substantially lower growth in the...

This Joint Staff Advisory Note provides World Bank and IMF staff analysis, and advices on key priorities to be strengthened during the implementation of the second Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP-2) in Mauritania. The PRSP-2 conveys an ambitious poverty reduction strategy based on a set...