An accurate understanding of how input use affects agricultural productivity in smallholder farming systems is key to designing policies that can improve productivity, food security, and living standards in rural areas. Studies examining the relationships between agricultural productivity and...

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

This paper quantifies the significance and magnitude of the effect of measurement error in remote sensing weather data in the analysis of smallholder agricultural productivity. The analysis leverages 17 rounds of nationally-representative, panel household survey data from six countries in...

The accumulation of personal wealth, stemming from ownership and control of assets, plays a critical role in advancing women's and men's economic opportunities. Yet, it is an understudied dimension of inequality across the developing world. To study individual-level wealth inequality and gender...

Agricultural productivity is hindered in smallholder farming systems due to several factors, including farmers' inability to meet crop-specific soil requirements. This paper focuses on soil suitability for maize production and creates multidimensional soil suitability profiles of smallholder...

Compared with the vast literature on the investment and productivity effects of land rights formalization, little attention has been paid to the impact of variation in individuals' tenure security under customary tenure regimes. This is a serious gap not only because most of Africa's rural land...

The paper provides evidence on the evolving socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic among households in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. The data allow estimating the immediate economic impacts of the pandemic, beginning in April 2020, and tracking how the situation evolved through...

With the surge in publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery, satellite-based monitoring of smallholder agricultural outcomes is gaining momentum. This paper provides recommendations on how large-scale household surveys should be conducted to generate the data needed to train models...

Established in 2016, the World Bank living standards measurement study - plus (LSMS+) program works to enhance the availability and quality of intra-household, self-reported, individual-disaggregated survey data collected in low- and middle-income countries on key dimensions of men's and women's...

Established in 2016, the World Bank living standards measurement study - plus (LSMS+) program works to enhance the availability and quality of intra-household, self-reported, individual-disaggregated survey data collected in low- and middle-income countries on key dimensions of men's and women's...