This report aims to familiarize those involved in estimating official poverty statistics with the SWIFT framework to enhance the frequency and quality of poverty data. It presentshow SWIFT works, discusses the advantages and caveats of the methodology, and provides examples of country-specific...

The World Bank has recently adopted a target of reducing the proportion of population living below US$1.25 a day at 2005 international prices to 3 percent by 2030. This paper reviews different projection methods and estimates the global poverty rate of 2030 modifying Ravallion (2013)'s approach...

The Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty from its 1990 level will be achieved in 2015, and the international development community is now moving to a new goal of “ending extreme poverty.” However, the data needed to monitor progress remain severely limited....

The March 2024 update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) involves several changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. In particular, some welfare aggregates have been revised, and the CPI, national accounts, and population input data have been updated. This document...

Measuring and comparing the levels of household welfare and poverty in a country require cost-of-living differences across regions to be properly adjusted. In measuring the spatial cost of living, the recent literature underscores the importance of detailed product quality information in the...

In June 2015, about 53,000 people were affected by unusually severe floods in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana. The real impact of such a disaster is a product of exposure ("Who was affected?"), vulnerability ("How much did the affected households lose?"), and socioeconomic resilience...

According to the official statistics published by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda, the country registered a decline in poverty from 46 percent in 2010/11 to 39 percent in 2013/14. This declining poverty trend was broadly debated and repeatedly questioned in national and...

This paper intends to inform the effort of the Sri Lankan government to reform the targeting efficacy of its social protection programs, in particular, Samurdhi, which currently distributes benefits based on self-reported income. The paper develops a proxy means test for Sri Lanka based on the...

Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of assets or property) and...

Close to half of the population of Afghanistan was living below the national poverty line prior to the regime change in August 2021, with no additional information on poverty collected in the country since the last official household survey in 2019/20. This paper fills this knowledge gap through...