This paper provides new cross-country evidence on the impact of cognitive skills, as measured by international achievement tests, on subsequent youth employment outcomes. In our initial analysis, we find that high average scores are strongly associated with increases in school enrollment and...

This paper reviews labor market trends throughout the developing world, identifies issues and policy priorities across groups of countries, and derives implications for the World Bank's new social protection and labor strategy. Five key issues are identified: a high and growing share of the...

This paper reviews the main challenges facing countries in attempting to improve labor market outcomes among youth, focusing on the issues that became starkly visible during the recent financial crisis. In order to better identify and set up human development interventions, the paper proposes an...

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. We develop a Proxy Means Test (PMT) for Sri Lanka based on the...

The September 2019 global poverty update from the World Bank includes revised survey data which lead to minor changes in the most recent global poverty estimates. The update includes revisions to 18 surveys from four countries. As a result of the revised data, the estimate of the global 1.90 US...

The March 2020 update to PovcalNet involves several changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. Some welfare aggregates have been changed for improved harmonization, and some of the CPI, national accounts, and population input data have been revised. This document explains these...

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is expected to drastically slow 2020 GDP per capita growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by about 5 percentage points compared to pre-pandemic forecasts. This note presents results from an analysis of a comprehensive database of surveys from 45 of 48 SSA countries...

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...

The early labor market impacts of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic resulted in widespread disruption to livelihoods. Previous analysis showed that between April and July 2020, across a sample of 39 countries, an average of 34 percent of workers stopped work, 20 percent of...

This paper presents results from four simulations of the impact of potential tax reforms in Pakistan on poverty, shared prosperity, and inequality. The simulations are carried out in the context of a dynamic computational general equilibrium (CGE) model that incorporates endogenous tax evasion....