Standard measures of poverty may reveal nothing about whether the poorest of the poor are being lifted-up or left-behind, yet this is a widespread concern among policy makers and citizens. The paper assesses whether public spending on social protection benefits the poorest and hence lifts the...

Data produced by the public sector can have transformational impacts on development outcomes through better targeting of resources, improved service delivery, cost savings, increased accountability, and more. Around the world, the amount of data produced by the public sector is increasing...

Existing data are severely insufficient for monitoring progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly for poorer countries. While we should continue efforts to produce new, high-quality data, this approach seems not feasible for all poorer countries. We call for a more...

Existing data are severely insufficient for monitoring progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly for poorer countries. While we should continue efforts to produce new, high-quality data, this approach seems not feasible for all poorer countries. We call for a more...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

The vision 2021 plan and the associated perspective plan 2010-2021, adopted by the Government of Bangladesh lay out a series of development targets for 2021. Among the core targets identified to monitor the progress toward the vision 2021 objectives is that of attaining a poverty headcount of 14...