The fast spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has resulted in the emergence of several hot-spots around the world. Several of these are located in areas associated with high levels of air pollution. This study investigates the relationship between exposure to particulate...

This paper introduces a Spatial Vector Autoregressive Moving Average (SVARMA) model in which multiple cross-sectional time series are modeled as multivariate, possibly fat-tailed, spatial autoregressive ARMA processes. The estimation requires specifying the cross-sectional spillover channels...

This paper revisits the issue of environment and development raised in the 1992 World Development Report, with new analysis tools and data. The paper discusses inference and interpretation in a machine learning framework. The results suggest that production gradually favors conserving the...

Somalia is highly data-deprived, leaving policy makers to operate in a statistical vacuum. To overcome this challenge, the World Bank implemented wave 2 of the Somali High Frequency Survey to better understand livelihoods and vulnerabilities and, especially, to estimate national poverty...

The High Frequency South Sudan Survey, implemented by the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the World Bank, conducted several waves of representative surveys across seven of the ten former states between 2015 and 2017. These surveys provided a long overdue update to...

Understanding the magnitude and importance of income shocks, such as drought or conflict, in causing and perpetuating poverty is critical to designing policies aimed at building resilience and contributing toward the goal of ending poverty. This paper uses micro-data from two waves of the Somali...

Misreporting is a well-known challenge for researchers in social sciences and even more so for policymakers who rely on accurate data to design effective relief strategies. This issue is especially prevalent if incentives for misreporting exist, for example, if there are perceived social or...

Interventions in highly insecure and fragile contexts are always confronted with the latent risk of not being able to implement the program as intended. Despite its high policy relevance, little is known about the impacts of program disruption or cancellation on beneficiaries. This study uses...

Enumeration areas are the operational geographic units for the collection, dissemination, and analysis of census data and are often used as a national sampling frame for various types of surveys. Traditionally, enumeration areas are created by manually digitizing small geographic units on...

In fragile states and areas beset by insecurity and conflict, the time available for a face-to-face interview is typically limited. That prevents administering the lengthy household consumption expenditure surveys used for measuring poverty. This paper presents a new approach to obtain unbiased...