Agricultural development is an essential engine of growth and poverty reduction, yet agricultural data suffer from poor quality and narrow sectoral focus. There are several reasons for this: (i) difficult-to-measure smallholder agriculture is prevalent in poor countries, (ii) agricultural data...

This paper reviews methods that have been employed to estimate poverty in contexts where household consumption data are unavailable or missing. These contexts range from completely missing and partially missing consumption data in cross-sectional household surveys, to missing panel household...

To assess the conventional view that assets uniformly improve childhood development through wealth effects, this paper tests whether different types of assets have different effects on child education. The analysis indicates that household durables and housing quality have the expected positive...

Poverty lines are typically higher in richer countries, and lower in poorer ones, reflecting the relative nature of national assessments of who is considered poor. In many high-income countries, poverty lines are explicitly relative, set as a share of mean or median income. Despite systematic...

World Bank's international poverty line of $1.90/day, at 2011 purchasing power parity, is based on a collection of national poverty lines, which were originally used to set the international poverty line of $1.25/day at 2005 purchasing power parity. This paper proposes an approach for estimating...

This paper investigates the impact of increases in wheat flour prices on household food security using unique nationally-representative data collected in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. It uses a new estimator, the Unconditional Quantile Regression estimator, based on influence functions, to...

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank’s...

This paper revisits the decades-old puzzle of the inverse plot-size productivity relationship, which states that land productivity decreases as plot size increases. Existing empirical studies on the inverse plot-size productivity relationship define land productivity or yields as self-reported...

Poverty estimates based on enumeration from a single point in time form the cornerstone for much of the literature on poverty. Households are typically interviewed once about their consumption or income, and their wellbeing is assessed from their responses. Global estimates of poverty that...