This paper analyzes the distributional effect of public spending in Zambia using the most recent data from the 2010 Living Conditions Monitoring Survey. The analysis focuses on both the "traditional" social sectors, such as education and public healthcare, as well as other spending areas less...

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) does not distinguish borders, race or gender. Everyone is affected but not equally. Women are at risk of seeing structural socioeconomic gaps deepen with COVID-9(Coronavirus), along with worsening violence and social norms. The authors explore the extent to which COVID-19...

There are multiple estimates of global monetary and multidimensional poverty, but there are still no estimates of populations at risk of social exclusion worldwide. This paper fills this gap by estimating the share and number of populations at risk of exclusion globally and regionally. It...

This study analyzes opportunities for children in Cote d'Ivoire, where opportunities refer to access to basic services and goods that improve the likelihood of a child maximizing his or her human potential. The principle that guides this analysis is one of equality of opportunity, which is that...

This article questions two widely accepted claims on long-term food insecurity in Asia, the world's (heterogeneous) region with the largest number of undernourished individuals. The first claim is that food production may not grow as fast as the pace of population growth in Asia, which will...

This note builds on previous collaboration between the World Bank Group and UNICEF to estimate the global extent of child poverty. We estimate that in 2017, 17.5 percent of children in the world (or 356 million) younger than 18 years lived on less than 1.90 Dollars PPP per day, as opposed to 7.9...